Platonism and the World Crisis

Humanity faces a number of pressing problems – ecological, religious and political. In the 2006 inaugural lecture of a continuing series at the Dublin Centre for the Study of the Platonic Tradition given under the general title of ‘Platonism and the World Crisis’, John M Dillon put forward a number of bold and radical solutions to these problems, drawn from the Platonic tradition. This book presents an essay based on that lecture, together with two further essays – The Urgency of Platonism: the Philosophical Background to the World Crisis by Brendan O’Byrne, and Towards a Philosophic Democracy by Tim Addey. Together the three essays question the assumptions and goals of modernism, offering the reader intelligent alternatives to the seemingly unstoppable march of humanity towards the destruction of itself and its environment.

In a world in which an increasing number of thinkers are urgently looking for new solutions to emerging problems, here is evidence that the best answers have been waiting quietly for at least two and a half thousand years – waiting for us to notice the continuing relevance of the profound wisdom of the Platonic tradition.