Alain de Libera symptomatically describes Platonism as the phantom of the Middle Ages: even though the medieval philosophy stems from an Aristotelian theoretical substrate, it nevertheless appears to be significantly marked by Platonism. Platonic philosophy thus persists despite the fact that the Timaeus was the only accessible and truly read Plato’s work in the Latin medieval West. The main objective of the present Master’s thesis is twofold: to uncover and explain the continuity of Platonism from the Old Academy to the dawn of humanism, and to examine the development of Platonic philosophy and the changes it was subjected to in its transition to the medieval Latin West. I focus on Plato’s doctrine of ideas in so far as they were identified with the eternal pattern after which the Demiurge constructed the world. I begin with a brief presentation of this topos in the Timaeus and then trace the identification of Platonic ideas with ideas in the mind of God, i.e. exemplarism, from Seneca to Bonaventure. As it turns out, both the latter and Thomas Aquinas acknowledged the existence of Platonic ideas as exemplary ideas in the mind of God, basing their arguments on a teleological argument which is, in turn, already found in the Timaeus.
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