An Introduction to the Special Issue “The Platonic Tradition, Nature Spirituality, and the Environment”

We can understand Platonism as both a storehouse of resources that can be drawn upon and a living philosophy capable of helping us address the present-day environmental crisis, one of humanity’s most important and pressing challenges. Platonism appears in the collected papers here in philosophical, theological, scientific, and literary contexts, demonstrating both its versatility and its capacity. One of the aims of promoting this avenue of research is to both explore and challenge the traditional characterisations and critiques of the Platonic tradition in relation to nature and ecology. This Special Issue demonstrates how Platonism can serve as a resource for addressing the environmental crisis in a present-day context. Collectively, the wide range of contributions allow us to begin to tackle the task of showing how a Platonically orientated metaphysics can provide an integrative and sustainable framework for conceptualising nature and the place of humans within it, particularly by offering an alternative to subject-centred epistemologies.