Plato

Biography

Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher who is widely considered the most important figure in the history of Western philosophy. Born in Athens to an aristocratic family, Plato became a devoted student of Socrates, whose execution in 399 BC profoundly shaped his life and thought. Around 387 BC Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world, which continued for nearly nine centuries. His philosophical works, written as dialogues featuring Socrates as the principal speaker, explore virtually every major philosophical question: justice, beauty, truth, knowledge, reality, language, mathematics, politics, ethics, and the nature of the soul. Among the most celebrated dialogues are the Republic (on justice and the ideal state), the Symposium (on love), the Phaedrus (on beauty and rhetoric), the Phaedo (on the immortality of the soul), the Apology (Socrates’ defense at trial), and the Timaeus (on cosmology). Plato’s Theory of Forms—the idea that the material world is a shadow of a higher realm of perfect, unchanging Ideas—has been one of the most influential philosophical concepts in Western history. Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized all of Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato."