Walter Pater as Oxford Hegelian: Plato and Platonism and T. H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics

Through an analysis of Walter Pater and T. H. Green’s closely related borrowings from Kant and Hegel, this article argues that Plato and Platonism, like Green’s Prolegomena, appropriates a Kantian epistemological critique, develops a Kantian ethical subject, and then moves beyond Kant’s autonomous subject towards a more Hegelian historical evolution of individual subject and state. This article also explores Pater’s idiosyncratic survey of Greek philosophy as an implicit alternative to Green’s moral philosophy