The philosopher

Plato

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) turned his teacher's conversations into literature and built from them a philosophy that has shaped Western thought for twenty-four centuries.

Life

Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family. As a young man he expected a career in politics, but two events turned him away from it: the cruelty of the oligarchy of the Thirty in 404 BCE, and the restored democracy's execution of Socrates in 399. After his teacher's death he travelled, possibly to Egypt and certainly to southern Italy and Sicily, where he met Pythagorean thinkers and later tried, unsuccessfully, to advise the rulers of Syracuse.

The Academy

Around 387 BCE, Plato founded a school in a grove outside Athens sacred to the hero Academus. The Academy studied mathematics, astronomy, politics and philosophy, and it lasted in one form or another for centuries. Its most famous student was Aristotle, who studied there for about twenty years before founding his own school.

The dialogues

Plato wrote dialogues rather than treatises. Socrates is usually the main speaker, which lets Plato show philosophy as a living activity of argument rather than a list of doctrines. Scholars commonly sort them into three loose periods:

• Early: short, searching conversations about single virtues: Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, and the Apology and Crito.
• Middle: Plato's great constructive works: Meno, Phaedo, Symposium and Republic.
• Late: more technical works that test and revise earlier ideas: Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus and the Laws.

Key ideas

The Forms

Plato argued that beyond the changing physical world there are perfect, unchanging realities, the Forms, which the mind grasps through reason. Read more in The Theory of Forms.

The soul

For Plato the soul has three parts: reason, spirit and appetite. A just person is one in whom reason, supported by spirit, governs appetite.

Knowledge as recollection

In the Meno, Socrates leads an uneducated boy to work out a geometry proof by questioning alone. Plato suggests that learning is a kind of remembering of truths the soul already holds.

Education and the Cave

Plato's most famous image describes education as turning the whole soul from shadows toward the light. See The Allegory of the Cave.

A suggested reading order

1. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito
2. Meno
3. Phaedo
4. Symposium
5. Republic
6. Theaetetus