Plato
c. 428–348 BCE, Athens
Classical Greek
Behind messy appearances lie perfect, unchanging Forms.
“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
The life
Born into a wealthy Athenian family with political connections on both sides, Plato was expected to enter public life. The execution of Socrates when Plato was around thirty ended that ambition and set the direction of his work.
He travelled after Socrates' death, including to southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean mathematics. He made repeated and humiliating attempts to tutor the tyrants of Syracuse into philosophical rule, and was reportedly sold into slavery on one trip before being ransomed.
Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy in a grove outside Athens, arguably the first institution of its kind in the West. It ran, in various forms, for centuries.
What shaped the ideas
Plato wrote in the shadow of two disasters: Athens losing the Peloponnesian War, and the democracy putting Socrates to death. Both convinced him that popular opinion was an unreliable guide and that the crowd could be flattered into anything.
His answer was to look for knowledge that did not depend on opinion at all. Mathematics gave him the model: truths that are certain, general and unchanging, grasped by reasoning rather than by looking.
Core arguments
- 01
The Theory of Forms
Beyond particular things there are perfect, unchanging originals that particulars imperfectly copy.
Every circle you can draw is flawed, yet you judge it against something. Equal sticks are never exactly equal, yet you understand Equality. The standard cannot come from the flawed examples, so it must be something else that they participate in.
- 02
The Allegory of the Cave
Most people mistake second-hand appearances for reality, and resent being corrected.
Prisoners chained facing a wall take shadows for the world. Freed and turned toward the fire, then dragged into sunlight, a prisoner is pained at every stage and would return to the wall if allowed. Education is that painful turning, not the pouring in of facts.
- 03
The tripartite soul
The soul has three parts, and justice is each doing its own work.
We are visibly divided against ourselves: thirsty yet refusing to drink. One thing cannot both push and pull in the same respect, so there must be distinct parts. Reason, spirit and appetite each has a proper role, and a just person is one where reason governs with spirit as its ally.
- 04
Recollection
Learning is recovering knowledge the soul already has.
In the Meno, an uneducated slave boy is walked to a geometric truth by questions alone, with nothing taught. If nothing was put in, the knowledge must have been there, so it was recollected rather than acquired.
Commonly got wrong
- "Platonic love" meaning chaste friendship is a Renaissance coinage. In the Symposium, erotic attraction is the first rung of a ladder that climbs toward the Form of Beauty, not something to be denied.
- The Republic may not be a political blueprint. Plato says explicitly he is building the city as a large-scale model of the soul, so reading it as a policy proposal for real Athens is contested.
- Plato is not a settled Platonist. In the Parmenides he raises objections to the Forms that he never clearly answers, which is why arguing about what he actually held is still a live industry.
Works
Apology, Crito, Euthyphro c. 399–390 BCE
Early dialogues, closest to the historical Socrates.
Meno c. 385 BCE
Can virtue be taught? Introduces recollection.
Republic c. 375 BCE
Justice, the Cave, the just city, the tripartite soul. His central work.
Symposium and Phaedrus c. 385–370 BCE
Love, beauty and rhetoric. The most literary of the dialogues.
Parmenides c. 370 BCE
Plato attacking his own Theory of Forms, and not obviously winning.
Laws c. 350 BCE
Late, long, and far more practical about politics than the Republic.
Republic Book VII for the Cave, or the Meno if you want a short, complete argument you can hold in your head.
Why they still get taught
He set the agenda: what is knowledge, what is justice, what is real, what is beauty. Whitehead's line that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato is an exaggeration that keeps being useful.
Chapters
- The Theory of Forms · Ancient Foundations
- The Allegory of the Cave · Ancient Foundations
- The Problem of Universals · What There Is
- Seven People at Dinner · The Words We Lost