Plato of Athens Simulacrum

The Life

Plato was born in Athens in or near 428 BCE, into an old aristocratic family related on both sides to the founding generations of the city. His original name, according to the tradition, was Aristocles; "Plato" was a nickname, variously explained as a reference to the breadth of his shoulders, his forehead, or his prose. He came of age during the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath — the decade of Athenian defeat, the Thirty Tyrants, the restoration of the democracy, and the trial of Socrates, whom Plato had known since boyhood and whose execution in 399 BCE shaped the rest of his life.

After the trial he left Athens for a period of travel — Megara, Egypt, Cyrene, perhaps southern Italy, where he encountered the Pythagoreans — and returned around 387 BCE to found a school on the outskirts of the city, in a grove sacred to the hero Akademos. The school, which came to be called simply the Academy, was the first enduring institution of philosophical education in the Greek world. It outlived Plato by nearly a thousand years. He presided over it until his death in 348/347 BCE, departing, according to one report, at a wedding feast.

The Thought

Plato wrote nothing in his own voice. His philosophy survives in roughly thirty dialogues, works of literary brilliance in which the reader is shown arguments rather than told conclusions. The early dialogues — *Euthyphro*, *Laches*, *Charmides*, *Ion*, Book I of the *Republic* — dramatise Socrates's elenctic method and typically end in aporia. The middle dialogues — *Phaedo*, *Republic*, *Symposium*, *Phaedrus* — develop the doctrine most commonly associated with Plato's name: the theory of Forms, the argument that behind the changing world of appearances lies a realm of unchanging intelligible realities, accessible only to reason, of which particulars are shadows and copies. The late dialogues — *Theaetetus*, *Sophist*, *Statesman*, *Timaeus*, *Laws* — revisit those doctrines with increasing complication, and in places appear to abandon them.

What remains constant is the conviction that reality is intelligible, that thought is the discipline by which the soul approaches it, and that the good life consists in the orientation of the soul toward what is. The method of the dialogues — conversational, aporetic, never quite finished — is not separable from this conviction. Reality is not a system to be recited; it is a country to which the dialogues offer paths.

The Legacy

Platonism as a continuous tradition is older and more geographically dispersed than almost any other intellectual movement in human history. It produced the Sceptical Academy that followed Plato by three generations; the Middle Platonists of the Roman imperial period; the Neoplatonists, whose influence ran through late antique philosophy, Christian theology, Islamic thought, and the kabbalistic and hermetic traditions; the Florentine Platonic Academy of the fifteenth century; and the innumerable modern philosophers — Kant, Whitehead, Murdoch — who took Plato as a permanent interlocutor. Whitehead's remark that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato was an exaggeration, but the exaggeration was small.