Plato

Life and legacy

Plato was born around 428 BCE into one of Athens's most prominent aristocratic families. His stepfather, Pyrilampes, was a close associate of Pericles, and several of his relatives were involved in the oligarchic coup of 404 BCE. As a young man Plato was drawn to Socrates, whose philosophical method and moral seriousness transformed his intellectual life. Socrates's trial and execution in 399 BCE was the decisive event of Plato's career - it convinced him that Athenian democracy was dangerously flawed and that the pursuit of truth required a new kind of institution.

After Socrates's death, Plato traveled for about a decade, visiting Italy (where he encountered Pythagorean philosophy), Sicily (where his entanglement with the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse nearly cost him his life), and possibly Egypt. Around 387 BCE he returned to Athens and founded the Academy in a grove sacred to the hero Academus, just outside the city walls. The Academy lasted for centuries - it was not finally closed until 529 CE by the Emperor Justinian - and served as the model for all subsequent institutions of higher learning. Aristotle studied there for twenty years.

Plato's philosophical works, written entirely in dialogue form, are among the supreme achievements of Western literature and thought. In the early dialogues - the Apology, Euthyphro, Meno, Gorgias - he portrays Socrates in conversation, exposing the ignorance of those who claim wisdom. In the middle dialogues - the Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus - Plato develops his own distinctive metaphysics, including the Theory of Forms: the idea that the objects of sense experience are imperfect copies of eternal, perfect, unchanging realities (the Forms) that can be grasped only by the intellect. The Republic, his masterpiece, combines metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, and political theory into a vision of the just city and the just soul.

The later dialogues - the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Laws - show Plato revising and complicating his earlier positions with remarkable intellectual honesty. The Parmenides subjects the Theory of Forms to devastating self-criticism, while the Timaeus offers a cosmological account that was enormously influential in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Laws, Plato's last and longest work, presents a more pragmatic and less utopian political philosophy than the Republic.

Plato's influence is genuinely incalculable. He shaped Aristotle, who both built on and reacted against his teacher's philosophy. Neoplatonism, developed by Plotinus in the 3rd century CE, became the dominant philosophical framework of late antiquity and profoundly influenced Christian, Islamic, and Jewish theology. The Academy's emphasis on mathematics as preparation for philosophical understanding influenced scientific thinking for centuries. In the modern era, Plato's political philosophy, his epistemology, and his ethical thought remain central to academic philosophy, and the Republic is still one of the most widely read works of Western civilization.

Key accomplishments

• Founded the Academy (~387 BCE), the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, which endured for over nine centuries
• Wrote the Republic, one of the most influential works of philosophy and political theory ever composed
• Developed the Theory of Forms, establishing the central questions of Western metaphysics and epistemology
• Created the philosophical dialogue as a literary genre, combining dramatic art with rigorous argument
• Taught Aristotle and established the intellectual tradition from which Western philosophy, theology, and science developed

Quotes

The myth of the cave: most people see only shadows on the wall and mistake them for reality.

Republic, Book 7 (514a-520a) - paraphrased; the Allegory of the Cave is narrated, not stated as an aphorism

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Republic, Book 1, 347c

Related figures