Walter Pater 
Plato and Platonism (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 

[T]he first true and correctly proportioned presentation of Platonism that has been given to the general reader.’-Paul Shorey



Through his idiosyncratic presentation of Plato, Pater offers us an account of a peculiarly
modern frame of mind. He converts Platos search for a primordial and transcendent unity into a poetic evocation of a material life that is prized in being lived from moment to moment.



The book is implicitly a manifesto, more authoritative for the way it seems rooted in an ‘historical’ account of the great founder of Western philosophy. It conveys the mental world of fifth-century Greece through a doctrine of experience that is in the process of becoming the emblem of early Modernism.

About the author

Plato and Platonism originated in a series of lectures that Pater gave to undergraduates in Oxford, where he was a Fellow of Brasenose College, teaching Classics and the History of Philosophy, from 1864 until his death. Early on, he gained the faintly scandalous reputation at Oxford of being an ‘infidel’ in religious matters; and by the time that he collected some of his essays in his first book-
Studies in the History of the Renaissance-in 1873, he had become moderately well known for his writings and opinions in both Oxford and London.