Platonism in the Renaissance
Okay kiddo, so in the Renaissance, some really smart people were super interested in the ideas of this guy named Plato.
Plato was a philosopher who lived a long long time ago in ancient Greece. He came up with lots of ideas about things like truth, beauty, justice, and how we should live our lives.
The people in the Renaissance thought that Plato’s ideas were sooo important that they wanted to study and understand them better. This is called “Platonism” - basically, they believed that Plato had some really great ideas that were worth keeping alive and thinking about.
One of the big things that Platonism focused on was the idea of there being a “higher reality”. This meant that there was a world of ideas, or concepts, that existed beyond the physical world we see around us.
For example, imagine you draw a picture of a cat. The cat you drew is a real thing, right? But there’s also the idea of a cat - what all cats have in common, what makes them “cat-like”. That idea is a part of this “higher reality” that Platonism talks about.
Platonism also talked about how everything in the physical world was just a “shadow” of the things in the higher reality. So basically, everything we see around us is less important than the ideas that they’re based on.
So why did people in the Renaissance care about Platonism? Well, they were really into learning and understanding the world better. They thought that Plato had some amazing ideas that could help them do that.
And a lot of famous Renaissance-era thinkers - like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - were big fans of Platonism. They wrote books and gave speeches about it, and it helped shape the way people thought about philosophy and spirituality during that time.
Plato was a philosopher who lived a long long time ago in ancient Greece. He came up with lots of ideas about things like truth, beauty, justice, and how we should live our lives.
The people in the Renaissance thought that Plato’s ideas were sooo important that they wanted to study and understand them better. This is called “Platonism” - basically, they believed that Plato had some really great ideas that were worth keeping alive and thinking about.
One of the big things that Platonism focused on was the idea of there being a “higher reality”. This meant that there was a world of ideas, or concepts, that existed beyond the physical world we see around us.
For example, imagine you draw a picture of a cat. The cat you drew is a real thing, right? But there’s also the idea of a cat - what all cats have in common, what makes them “cat-like”. That idea is a part of this “higher reality” that Platonism talks about.
Platonism also talked about how everything in the physical world was just a “shadow” of the things in the higher reality. So basically, everything we see around us is less important than the ideas that they’re based on.
So why did people in the Renaissance care about Platonism? Well, they were really into learning and understanding the world better. They thought that Plato had some amazing ideas that could help them do that.
And a lot of famous Renaissance-era thinkers - like Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - were big fans of Platonism. They wrote books and gave speeches about it, and it helped shape the way people thought about philosophy and spirituality during that time.