Platonic Tradition

The Platonic Tradition by Peter Kreeft, 134 pages

The Platonic tradition, Peter Kreeft argues, is the mainstream of Western thought, which springs from Plato's central insights - that there exist transcendent truths, that these are accessible to human reason, and that this knowledge is communicable.  Subsequent thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas, he contends, added to these claims without denying them.  He then briefly retells the story of philosophy since Ockham as the progressive narrowing of thought from nominalism to deconstructionism, ending with the suggestion that personalism may mark the beginnings of a new turn away from nihilism.

This short book is itself derived from a series of audio lectures, and it is more of a transcript than an adaptation - anyone familiar with Kreeft's voice will hear his distinctive cadence in these pages.  This is, of course, very fitting for a work inspired by Plato.  Unfortunately, it is also riddled with surface errors another round of proofreading might have caught.