Does the philosopher Plato, despite his elevation to a supreme position in the intelligible world of the Beautiful itself, or the Idea of Beauty, really exhibit any appreciation of the beauties of nature, or Natural Beauty? The omission of any mention of the beauties of Nature in Diotima’s ladder of ascent to the Beautiful Itself in the Symposium leads me to propose that Plato, in line with the sensibility of Greeks of the Classical period in general, does not possess what would later be termed an ‘Arcadian’ view of the beauties of the natural world; and even in the later Platonist tradition there is little evidence of such sensibility.

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Xenocrates’ Nous-Monad The precise origin of the concept of the Platonic Forms, or Ideas, as thoughts of God is a long-standing puzzle in the history of Platonism, which I am on record as dismissing somewhat brusquely in various works. I am glad to have an opportunity to return to it now, in this distinguished company. I propose to begin my consideration of it on this occasion by returning to the seminal article of Audrey Rich, published in Mnemosyne back in 1954. As you may recall, Rich’s th...

In Plato's Timaeus and the Missing Fourth Guest, Donna M. Altimari Adler proposes a new Timaeus scale structure. She finds the harmonic cosmos, mathematically, at 35 A-36 D, regarding the text as a number generator. Plato's primary number sequence, she argues, yields a matrix defining a sophisticated harmony of the spheres. She stresses the Decad as the pattern governing both human perception and the generation of all things, in the Timaeus, including the World Soul and musical scale symbolizing it. She precisely identifies Plato's "fabric" and its locus of severance and solves other thorny problems of textual interpretation.