The Greatest Individual

Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical discussions, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Being taught by Socrates, and influencing Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy. Born in Athens, Greece between 429-423 BC, Plato had “quickness of mind and modesty as a boy,” and the “first fruits of his youth [were] infused with hard work and love of study”. He took classes in grammar, music, gymnastics, and philosophy from the most distinguished teachers of his time. One of his mentors was the famous Socrates. After Socrates’ death, Plato carried on much of his former teacher’s work and eventually founded his own school, the Academy, in 385 BC. The Academy eventually became the most famous school in the classical world, and its most famous pupil was Aristotle.
Much is known about Plato’s teachings because he wrote dialogues between Socrates and others that would explore philosophical issues. These dialogues would be used in his school as starting points for discussion. The Platonic dialogues consist of Socrates asking questions of another and proving, through these questions, that the other person has the wrong idea on the subject. Initially, Plato seems to have carried on the methods of Socrates, concentrating on the discussions of basic ethical issues: what is friendship? what is virtue? can virtue be taught? However, Plato later began to develop his own theories and does more teaching than he does questioning. The fundamental aspect of Plato’s thought is the theory of “ideas” or “forms.” Plato, like so many other Greek philosphers, was hindered by the question of change in the physical world. Heraclitus had said that there is nothing certain or stable except the fact that things change, and Parmenides and the Eleatic philosophers claimed that all change, motion, and time was an illusion. Where was the truth? How can these two opposite positions be reconciled? Plato was able to combine the two.
The most famous of Plato’s dialogues is a dialogue called The Republic. The Republic is one of the most influential works in Western philosophy. It deals with the primary question of how to live a good life; then is shaped into the parallel question: what is justice in the State, or what would an ideal State be like, and what is a just individual? These questions also encompass many others, such as how the citizens of a state should be educated, which arts should be encouraged, what form its government should take, who should do the governing and for what rewards, what is the nature of the soul, and finally what (if any) divine sanctions and afterlife should be believed in. The dialogue then covers just about every aspect of Plato’s thought.
Plato imagines two worlds, the sensible world and the intelligible world, as existing on a line that can be divided in the middle: the lower part of the line consists of the visible world and the upper part of the line makes up the intelligible world. Each half of the line relates to a certain type of knowledge: of the visible world, we can only have opinion; of the intelligible world we achieve “knowledge.” Each of these divisions can also be divided in two. The visible or changing world can be divided into a lower region, “illusion,” which is made up of shadows, reflections, paintings, poetry, etc., and an upper region, “belief,” which refers to any kind of knowledge of things that change. “Belief” may be true most of the time but occasionally is wrong (since things in the visible world change); belief is practical and may serve as a relatively reliable guide to life but doesn’t really involve thinking things out to the point of certainty. The upper region can be divided into, on the lower end, “reason,” which is knowledge of things like mathematics but which require that some postulates be accepted without question, and “intelligence,” which is the knowledge of the highest and most abstract categories of things, an understanding of the ultimate good.
He displayed in his works his absorption of political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he proposed are so profound and the strategies he used for tackling them so provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him.

He influenced Aristotle, who may not have always agreed with his mentor, to find his own theories and prove them, introducing inductive reasoning to the world, which is still a major principal of Western science. In practically every generation there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some respects. He was concerned about how philosophy should be perceived, and what its purpose was, that he transformed the intellectual currents he was living in, and proved that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived, is a rigorous examination of ethical, political, and metaphysical issues, and gave it a distinctive method — which may be what makes him so important and stand out in the history of our world.

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