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Plato (Greek: Πλάτων Plátōn) (ca. May 21?
427 BC – ca. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek
philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and
founder of the Academy in Athens. In countries speaking Arabic, Turkish,
Persian, or Urdu, he is called Eflatun, which means a spring of water,
and, metaphorically, of knowledge.
Plato lectured extensively at the Academy,
but he also wrote on many philosophical issues. The most important
writings of Plato are his dialogues, although a handful of epigrams also
survive, and some letters have come down to us under his name. We have
very good reason to believe that all the known dialogues of Plato
survive; some of the dialogues which the Greeks ascribed to him are
considered by the consensus of scholars to be either suspect (e.g.,
First Alcibiades, Clitophon) or probably spurious (such as Demodocus, or
the Second Alcibiades).
Socrates is often a character in the
dialogues of Plato. How much of the content and argument of any given
dialogue is Socrates' point of view, and how much of it is Plato's, is
heavily disputed. However, Plato was doubtless strongly influenced by
Socrates' teachings, so many of the ideas presented, at least in his
early works, were probably borrowings.
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Biography
Plato was born in Athens in May or December
around 427 BC. He was raised in a moderately well-to-do aristocratic
family. His father was named Ariston, and his mother Perictione. His
family claimed descent from the ancient Athenian kings, and he was
related—though there is disagreement as to exactly how—to the prominent
politician Critias. Plato's own real name was Aristocles; his nickname,
Plato, originated from wrestling. Since Plato means broad, it probably
refers either to his physical appearance or to his wrestling stance or
style.
Plato became a pupil of Socrates in his
youth, and—at least according to his own account—he attended his
master's trial, though not his execution. He was deeply affected by the
city's treatment of Socrates, and much of his early work records his
memories of his teacher. It is suggested that much of his ethical
writing is in pursuit of a society where similar injustices could not
occur.
Plato was also deeply influenced by a
number of prior philosophers, including: the Pythagoreans, whose notions
of numerical harmony have clear echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms;
Anaxagoras, who taught Socrates and who held that the mind, or reason,
pervades everything; and Parmenides, who argued for the unity of all
things and may have influenced Plato's concept of the soul.
When he was 40 years old, Plato founded one
of the earliest known organized schools in Western civilization on a
plot of land in the Grove of Academe. The Academy was "a large enclosure
of ground which was once the property of a citizen at Athens named
Academus... some, however, say that it received its name from an ancient
hero" (Robinson, Arch. Graec. I i 16), and it operated until AD 529,
when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium because he saw it as a
threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many intellectuals were
schooled in the Academy, the most prominent one being Aristotle.
Work
Themes
Unlike Socrates, Plato wrote down his
philosophical views, leaving behind a considerable number of
manuscripts.
In Plato's writings, one finds debates
concerning the best possible form of government, featuring adherents of
aristocracy, democracy, monarchy and others. A central theme is the
conflict between nature and convention, concerning the role of heredity
and the environment on human intelligence and personality long before
the modern "nature versus nurture" debate began in the time of Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke, with its modern continuation in such
controversial works as The Mismeasure of Man and The Bell Curve.
Another key distinction and theme in the
Platonic corpus is the dichotomy between knowledge and opinion, which
foreshadow modern debates between David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and has
been taken up by postmodernists and their opponents, more commonly as
the distinction between the 'objective' and the 'subjective'.
Even the story of the lost city or
continent of Atlantis came to us as an illustrative story told by Plato
in his Timaeus and Critias.
Form and basis
Plato wrote mainly in the form known as
dialogue. In the early dialogues, several characters discuss a topic by
asking questions of one another. Socrates figures prominently, and a
lively, more disorganized form of elenchos/dialectic is present; these
are called the Socratic Dialogues.
However, the nature of these dialogues
changed a great deal over the course of Plato's life. It is generally
agreed that Plato's earlier works are more closely based on Socrates'
thought, whereas his later writing increasingly breaks away from the
views of his former teacher. In the middle dialogues, Socrates becomes a
mouthpiece for Plato's own philosophy, and the question-and-answer style
is more pro forma: the main figure represents Plato and the minor
characters have little to say except "yes", "of course" and "very true".
The late dialogues read more like treatises, and Socrates is often
absent or quiet. It is assumed that while some of the early dialogues
could be based on Socrates' actual conversations, the later dialogues
were written entirely by Plato. The question of which, if any, of the
dialogues are truly Socratic is known as the Socratic problem.
The ostensible mise-en-scene of a dialogue
distances both Plato and a given reader from the philosophy being
discussed; one can choose between at least two options of perception:
either to participate in the dialogues, in the ideas being discussed, or
choose to see the content as expressive of the personalities contained
within the work.
The dialogue format also allows Plato to
put unpopular opinions in the mouth of unsympathetic characters, such as
Thrasymachus in The Republic.
Metaphysics
Perhaps Plato's greatest legacy was his
dualistic metaphysics, often called Platonism or (Exaggerated) Realism.
Plato's metaphysics divides the world into two distinct aspects: the
intelligible world of "forms", and the perceptual world we see around
us. He saw the perceptual world, and the things in it, as imperfect
copies of the intelligible forms or ideas. These forms are unchangeable
and perfect, and are only comprehensible by the use of the intellect or
understanding—i.e., a capacity of the mind that does not include
sense-perception or imagination. This division can be found before Plato
in Zoroastrian philosophy (6th century BC), in which the dichotomy is
referened as the Minu (intelligence) and Giti (perceptual) worlds.
Zoroastrianism may also have partially influenced Plato's Republic
concept with the Zoroastrian ideal city, Shahrivar.
In the Republic Books VI and VII, Plato
uses a number of metaphors to explain his metaphysical views: the
metaphor of the sun, the well-known allegory of the cave, and most
explicitly, the divided line.
Taken together, these metaphors convey a
complex and, in places, difficult theory: there is something called The
Form of the Good (often interpreted as Plato's God), which is the
ultimate object of knowledge and which, as it were, sheds light on all
the other forms (i.e., universals: abstract kinds and attributes), and
from which all other forms "emanate". The Form of the Good does this in
somewhat the same way as the sun sheds light on, or makes visible and
"generates" things, in the perceptual world. (See Plato's metaphor of
the sun)
In the perceptual world, the particular
objects we see around us bear only a dim resemblance to the more
ultimately real forms of Plato's intelligible world; it is as if we are
seeing shadows of cut-out shapes on the walls of a cave, which are mere
representations of the reality outside the cave, illuminated by the sun.
(See Plato's allegory of the cave)
We can imagine everything in the universe
represented on a line of increasing reality; it is divided once in the
middle, and then once again in each of the resulting parts. The first
division represents that between the intelligible and the perceptual
worlds. This is followed by a corresponding division in each of these
worlds: the segment representing the perceptual world is divided into
segments representing "real things" on the one hand, and shadows,
reflections and representations on the other. Similarly, the segment
representing the intelligible world is divided into segments
representing first principles and most general forms, on the one hand,
and more derivative, "reflected" forms, on the other. (See the divided
line of Plato)
The form of government derived from this
philosophy turns out to be one of a rigidly fixed hierarchy of
hereditary social classes, in which the arts are mostly suppressed for
the good of the state, the size of the city and its social classes is
determined by mathematical formulae, and eugenic measures are applied
secretly by rigging the lotteries in which the right to reproduce is
allocated. The exact relationship of such a government to the lofty
philosophy presented in the book has been debated.
Plato's metaphysics, and particularly its
dualism between the intelligible and the perceptual, would inspire later
Neoplatonic thinkers, such as Plotinus and Gnostics, and many other
metaphysical realists. For more on Platonic realism in general, see
Platonic realism and the Forms.
Epistemology
Plato also had some influential opinions on
the nature of knowledge and learning which he propounded in the Meno,
which began with the question of whether virtue can be taught, and
proceeded to expound the concepts of recollection, learning as the
discovery of pre-existing knowledge, and right opinion, opinions which
are correct but have no clear justification (see Platonic epistemology).
Platonic scholarship
Plato's thought is often compared with that
of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the
Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the
Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher".
However, in the Byzantine Empire, the study of Plato continued.
The Medieval scholastic philosophers did
not have access to the works of Plato—nor the knowledge of Greek needed
to read them. Plato's original writings were essentially lost to Western
civilization until they were brought from Constantinople in the century
before its fall. Medieval scholars knew of Plato only through
translations into Latin from the translations into Arabic by Persian and
Arab scholars. These scholars not only translated the texts of the
ancients, but expanded them by writing extensive commentaries and
interpretations on Plato's and Aristotle's works (see Al-Farabi,
Avicenna, Averroes).
Only in the Renaissance, with the general
resurgence of interest in classical civilization, did knowledge of
Plato's philosophy become widespread again in the West. Many of the
greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with
Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance, with the
support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo de Medici, saw Plato's philosophy
as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences. By the 19th century,
Plato's reputation was restored, and at least on par with Aristotle's.
Notable Western philosophers have continued
to examine Plato's work since that time, diverging from traditional
academic approaches with their own philosophy as a basis. Nietzsche
attacked Plato's moral and political theories, Heidegger expounded on
Plato's obfuscation of Being, and Karl Popper argued in in The Open
Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Plato's proposal for a government
system in The Republic was prototypically totalitarian.
Bibliography
Plato's writings (most of them dialogues)
have been published in several fashions; this has led to several
conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts.
Those works ascribed to Plato that have a
separate Wikipedia article can be found in Category:Dialogues of Plato
By tetralogy
One tradition regarding the arrangement of
Plato's texts is according to tetralogies. This scheme is ascribed by
Diogenes Laertius to an ancient scholar and court astrologer to Tiberius
named Thrasyllus.
In the list below, works by Plato are
marked (1) if there is no consensus among scholars as to whether Plato
is the author, and (2) if scholars generally agree that Plato is not the
author of the work. Unmarked works are assumed to have been written by
Plato.
Tetralogies
I. Euthyphro, (The) Apology (of Socrates),
Crito, Phaedo
II. Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist,
Statesman
III. Parmenides, Philebus, (The) Symposium,
Phaedrus
IV. First Alcibiades (1), Second Alcibiades
(2), Hipparchus (2), (The) (Rival) Lovers (2)
V. Theages (2), Charmides, Laches, Lysis
VI. Euthydemus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno
VII. (Greater) Hippias (major) (1),
(Lesser) Hippias (minor), Ion, Menexenus
VIII. Clitophon (1), (The) Republic,
Timaeus, Critias
IX. Minos (2), (The) Laws, Epinomis (2),
Letters (1)
Works not in tetralogies
The remaining works were transmitted under
Plato's name, most of them already considered spurious in antiquity:
Axiochus (2), Definitions (2), Demodocus
(2), Epigrams, Eryxias (2), Halcyon (2), On Justice (2), On Virtue (2),
Sisyphus (2)
Stephanus pagination
The usual system for making unique
references to sections of the text by Plato derives from a 16th century
edition of Plato's works by Henricus Stephanus. An overview of Plato's
writings according to this system can be found in the Stephanus
pagination article.
Loeb Classical Library
James Loeb provided a very popular edition
of Plato's works, still in print in the 21st century: see Loeb Classical
Library#Plato for how Plato's works were named in Loeb's publications.
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