Members of the Platonist school of Illinois came from a range of intellectual and religious backgrounds; no creedal or confessional orientation was necessary for joining, and members were free to interpret Plato and other philosophic texts in whichever direction they took them. They operated no less than three journals – The Platonist, Bibliotheca Platonica, and the Journal of the American Akademe – and at their final meeting in 1982, 433 of the town’s fewer than 20,000 residents had at one time been members.
The ultimate object of the group’s common effort was not the production of scholarship, but rather the production of good human lives through a project of collective education and edification. Jones held regular public lectures, and was famous for his ‘wonderful insight into Platonian philosophy’. But the primary form of group engagement was the seminar, in which members made contributions to a shared discussion guided by a common object of study – a dialogue of Plato, perhaps, or a work of Neoplatonic philosophy. Anderson records that:
One member easily burst forth with spontaneous intuitive insights whenever the spirit called her … One member flowered forth with pertinent bits of poetry whenever occasion permitted. Another had a ready streak of humor to lighten the discussion when it became too heated or involved. The group ranged in attitude from those who took their philosophy no more seriously than anything else to those who moved to Jacksonville for the very purpose of philosophical enlightenment.
Jones wrote one book on Plato, a commentary on the Laws. He was, with Harris and Amos Bronson Alcott, one of the founders of the Concord School in Massachusetts, where the thinkers of the Midwest would travel to debate the merits of Greek and German philosophy against New England Transcendentalism. The meetings between the supercilious New Englanders and the earnest, egalitarian Midwesterners were often comical, as the writer Louisa May Alcott (daughter of Amos) gleefully recounts in her diary:
I had a private laugh when Mrs ______ asked one of the newcomers [from the West], with her superior air, if she had ever looked into Plato. And the modest lady from Jacksonville answered, with a twinkle at me: ‘We have been reading Plato in Greek for the past six years.’ Mrs ______ subsided after that.
The prairie schools of philosophy were not just local curiosities; over the course of their roughly three decades of existence, they exerted a lasting influence on US intellectual culture, however much they themselves have been forgotten. They encouraged the growth of similar philosophical societies from the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard, in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and Massachusetts; they established a model for small-group adult education, contrasted with, for instance, the popular Lyceum model of the large public lecture; and they rekindled an interest in the study of classical, Medieval and early modern philosophy and literature among US thinkers who, influenced by transcendentalism and pragmatism, were all too often focused on what was simply useful or new.