Plato (428-347 BC) The Greek philosopher Plato was among the most important and
creative thinkers of the ancient world. His work set forth most of the important
problems and concepts of Western philosophy, psychology, logic, and politics,
and his influence has remained profound from ancient to modern times. Plato was
born in Athens in 428 BC. Both his parents were of distinguished Athenian
families, and his stepfather, an associate of Pericles, was an active
participant in the political and cultural life of Periclean Athens. Plato seems
as a young man to have been destined for an aristocratic political career. The
excesses of Athenian political life, however, both under the oligarchical rule
(404-403) of the so-called Thirty Tyrants and under the restored democracy, seem
to have led him to give up these ambitions. In particular, the execution (399)
of Socrates had a profound effect on his plans. The older philosopher was a
close friend of Plato's family, and Plato's writings attest to Socrates' great
influence on him. After Socrates' death Plato retired from active Athenian life
and traveled widely for a number of years. In 388 BC he journeyed to Italy and
Sicily, where he became the friend of Dionysius the Elder, ruler of Syracuse,
and his brother-in-law Dion. The following year he returned to Athens, where he
founded the Academy, an institution devoted to research and instruction in
philosophy and the sciences. Most of his life thereafter was spent in teaching
and guiding the activities of the Academy. When Dionysius died (367), Dion
invited Plato to return to Syracuse to undertake the philosophical education of
the new ruler, Dionysius the Younger. Plato went, perhaps with the hope of
founding the rule of a philosopher-king as envisioned in his work the Republic.
The visit, however, ended (366) in failure. In 361, Plato went to Syracuse
again. This visit proved even more disastrous, and he returned (360) to the
Academy. Plato died in 347 BC. Plato's published writings, of which apparently
all are preserved, consist of some 26 dramatic dialogues on philosophical and
related themes. The precise chronological ordering of the dialogues remains
unclear, but stylistic and thematic considerations suggest a rough division into
three periods. The earliest dialogues, begun after 399 BC, are seen by many
scholars as memorials to the life and teaching of Socrates. Three of them, the
Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, describe Socrates' conduct immediately before,
during, and after his trial. The early writings include a series of short
dialogues that end with no clear and definitive solution to the problems raised.
Characteristically, Plato has Socrates ask questions of the form "What is
X?" and insist that he wants not examples or instances of X but what it is
to be X, the essential nature, or Form, of X. In the Charmides the discussion
concerns the question "What is temperance?”; in the Laches, "What is
courage?” in the Euthyphro, "What is holiness?" The first book of
the Republic may originally have been such a dialogue, devoted to the question
"What is justice?" Socrates holds that an understanding of the
essential nature in each case is of primary importance, but he does not claim
himself to have any such understanding. A formal mode of cross-examination
called elenchus, in which the answers to questions put by Socrates are shown to
result in a contradiction of the answerer's original statement, reveals the
ignorance of the answerer as well. Typically, these answerers are self-professed
experts (the title characters of the Gorgias and Protagoras, for example, were
leading Sophists; thus their inability to provide a definition is particularly
noteworthy. In the Apology, Socrates describes his mission as one of exposing
this ignorance, an exposure he takes to be a necessary preliminary to true
wisdom. Although the dialogues appear to end in ignorance, the dialectical
structure of each work is such that a complex and subtle understanding of the
concept emerges. The dialogues of the middle period were begun after the
founding of the Academy. Here more openly positive doctrines begin to emerge in
the discourse of Socrates. The dialogues of this period include what is widely
thought to be Plato's greatest work, the Republic. Beginning with a discussion
on the nature of justice, the dialogue articulates a vision of an ideal
political community and the education appropriate to the rulers of such a
community. Justice is revealed to be a principle of each thing performing the
function most appropriate to its nature, a principle of the proper adjudication
of activity and being. In political terms, this principle is embodied in a
society in which citizens perform the tasks for which they are best suited; in
the individual human soul the principle is to be discovered when each part of
the soul performs its proper and appropriate function. Reason in both instances
is to rule, but in both the political community and the individual soul, justice
is ideally coupled with the virtue of temperance, the harmony and self-mastery
that results when all elements agree as to which should do what. Thus the rule
of reason is not a tyranny but the harmonious rule of the happily unified
individual and society. In the middle books of this dialogue, Plato develops, as
an account of the nature of being and understanding, the theory of Forms
foreshadowed in his earlier writings. The Form is introduced as a principle
explaining individual instances of being X, the very thing itself that is meant
by the name X and that is the transcendent object of understanding what it is to
be X. The Forms constitute a realm of unchanging being to which the world of
individual changing objects is subordinate. The Form of good enjoys a unique
status, responsible for the being and intelligibility of the world as a whole.
In the Theaetetus the nature of understanding itself is explored. A critique of
suggested definitions shows that understanding, or knowledge, involves judgment
concerning the being of things, not a mere acquaintance with them in perception
or simple mental awareness. The Phaedo and the Symposium are dramatically
elaborate pieces dealing, respectively, with death and love. The Phaedo, which
represents Socrates' final hours, considers the nature of the soul and portrays
the philosophical life as a separation of soul from body, which prepares the
philosopher for death. In the Symposium, Socrates portrays love as the creative
attraction toward the beautiful and the good itself. In the dialogues of the
later period, begun after Plato returned from Syracuse, the figure of Socrates
recedes into the background. In the Sophist and Statesman the central figure is
an unnamed visitor from Elea. The Sophist shows how a proper understanding of
appearance depends on an account of being and nonbeing and of the relation
between particulars and Forms. In the Parmenides the theory of Forms comes under
exacting scrutiny, and arguments are presented to show that the Forms cannot be
entities of the same sort as those whose being they explain. The Timaeus
presents a semimythical description of the origin and nature of the universe,
and the Philebus considers the place of pleasure in the good life. In the Laws,
Plato's longest and last work a model constitution for an ideal city is
considered. Central to Plato's thought is the power of reason to reveal the
intelligibility and order governing the changing world of appearance and to
create, at both the political and the individual level, a harmonious and happy
life. Socrates' view that virtue is a form of understanding and that the good
life must consequently be grounded in knowledge. It is refined into the view
that philosophical education is to effect a harmony between reason and passion,
“a life of self-mastery” in which reason governs the will not as something
alien to it but as its natural guide and source. The doctrine of recollection,
according to which learning is the remembering of “a wisdom” that the soul
enjoyed prior to its incarnation, is a mythical statement of this view that
neither reason nor the intelligible order that it reveals is alien to the human
soul. This order--seen by Plato as providing an account both of the being and of
the intelligibility of the world of appearance--is articulated in the theory of
Forms. Forms are the principles of being in the world, of the fact that the
world presents itself as instances of being this or that, as well as the
principles of human understanding of those instances of being. The nature and
intelligibility of the world of appearance can thus be accounted for, in Plato's
view, only by recognizing it as an "image" of the truly intelligible
structure of being itself, which is the world of Forms. The relationship between
Forms and particulars, or between the world of being and the world of
appearance, was recognized by Plato to be deeply problematic. He remained clear,
however, that no theory could fail to recognize both features of the world
without falling prey to either the relativism of Heraclitus or the monism of
Parmenides, both of which destroy the very possibility of being and
understanding. Plato sees the world of being itself governed by the Form of the
good, as also the source of value and the object of proper desire. The
philosopher is thus pictured as in love with the Forms, that is, in love with
the world as it truly is. His wish to see through the world of flux to the true
principles of its being is thus basically an act of love. This love is not
simply an attraction to the good but a creative force for the procreation of the
good. Directed toward others, it is the power of education, the bringing to
birth of understanding and virtue through the process of dialectic, as portrayed
in Socrates' relation to the youths about him. Reason for Plato, as for the
Greek tradition in general, is most clearly manifest in logos, the word, and
language, as the medium in which reason articulates being, is a central topic
throughout the dialogues. Plato was impressed by the fact that language has the
capacity both to articulate the intelligibility of the world and to belie the
world's true being. He constantly addresses the question of how to purge
language of its potential deceptiveness, how to win the fidelity of words to the
world. Bad poetry and bad rhetoric alike are pathological forms of the
inescapable dissociation of word and world; the Platonic question is how to make
this dissociation benign. The central vehicle that Plato envisions for this
purpose is dialectic, the dialogue that refines and articulates the true shape
and tendency of speech and understanding. This dialectic is presented
mimetically in the dialogues themselves, which are thus not simply presentations
of philosophical views but representations of philosophy at work, of human
beings engaged in the distinctively human and highly civilized activity of
rational conversation. The influence of Plato's thought is seen in the
continuing vitality of the Platonic tradition through subsequent centuries. The
major philosophers of late Hellenism, most notably Plotinus and Proclus, were
self-professed Platonists. After the closing of the Academy, Neoplatonism
continued to flourish in the Islamic and Byzantine world, and Latin Neoplatonism
was a strong intellectual factor throughout the Middle Ages. During the
Renaissance there occurred a great rebirth of Platonic thought in the West. The
Byzantine philosopher Giorgius Gemistus Pletho (c.1355-1452) introduced the
study of Plato to Renaissance Florence, and the subsequent translations and
commentaries of Marsilio Ficino and others laid the groundwork for a flourishing
school of Platonic thought in the Florentine Academy. In 17th-century England
the rationalistic theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists based much of
their thinking on Plato. The 19th and 20th centuries have witnessed, besides the
important influence of Plato on the Romantic Movement, the development of a
strong Anglo-European tradition of Platonic scholarship.