Plato (redirected from Platonian)

Plato (plā`tō), 427?–347 B.C., Greek philosopher. Plato's teachings have been among the most influential in the history of Western civilization.

Life

After pursuing the liberal studies of his day, he became in 407 B.C. a pupil and friend of Socrates. From about 388 B.C. he lived for a time at the court of Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse. On his return to Athens, Plato founded a school, the Academy, where he taught mathematics and philosophy until his death. His teaching was interrupted by two more visits to Syracuse (367 and 361 B.C.), which he made in the vain hope of seeing his political ideals realized in Sicily.

Works and Philosophy

Plato was a superb writer, and his works are part of the world's great literature. His extant work is in the form of dialogues and epistles. Some of the dialogues and many of the epistles attributed to him are known to be spurious, while others are doubtful. In the various dialogues he touched upon almost every problem that has occupied subsequent philosophers. The dialogues are divided into three groups according to the probable order of composition.

Early Works

The earliest group of dialogues, called Socratic, include chiefly the Apology, which presents the defense of Socrates; the Meno, which asks whether virtue can be taught; and the Gorgias, which concerns the absolute nature of right and wrong. These early dialogues present Socrates in conversations that illustrate his main ideas—the unity of virtue and knowledge and of virtue and happiness. Each dialogue treats a particular problem without necessarily resolving the issues raised.

Philosophical Themes and Mature Works

Plato was always concerned with the fundamental philosophical problem of working out a theory of the art of living and knowing. Like Socrates, Plato began convinced of the ultimately harmonious structure of the universe, but he went further than his mentor in trying to construct a comprehensive philosophical scheme. His goal was to show the rational relationship between the soul, the state, and the cosmos. This is the general theme of the great dialogues of his middle years: the Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Philebus. In the Republic he shows how the operation of justice within the individual can best be understood through the analogy of the operation of justice within the state, which Plato proceeds to set out in his conception of the ideal state. However, justice cannot be understood fully unless seen in relation to the Idea of the Good, which is the supreme principle of order and truth.

It is in these dialogues that the famous Platonic Ideas (see realism) are discussed. Plato argued for the independent reality of Ideas as the only guarantee of ethical standards and of objective scientific knowledge. In the Republic and the Phaedo he postulates his theory of Forms. Ideas or Forms are the immutable archetypes of all temporal phenomena, and only these Ideas are completely real; the physical world possesses only relative reality. The Forms assure order and intelligence in a world that is in a state of constant flux. They provide the pattern from which the world of sense derives its meaning.

The supreme Idea is the Idea of the Good, whose function and place in the world of Ideas is analogous to that of the sun in the physical world. Plato saw his task as that of leading men to a vision of the Forms and to some sense of the highest good. The principal path is suggested in the famous metaphor of the cave in the Republic, in which man in his uninstructed state is chained in a world of shadows. However, man can move up toward the sun, or highest good, through the study of what Plato calls dialectic. The supreme science, dialectic, is a method of inquiry that proceeds by a constant questioning of assumptions and by explaining a particular idea in terms of a more general one until the ultimate ground of explanation is reached.

The Republic, the first Utopia in literature, asserts that the philosopher is the only one capable of ruling the just state, since through his study of dialectic he understands the harmony of all parts of the universe in their relation to the Idea of the Good. Each social class happily performs the function for which it is suited; the philosopher rules, the warrior fights, and the worker enjoys the fruits of his labor. In the Symposium, perhaps the most poetic of the dialogues, the path to the highest good is described as the ascent by true lovers to eternal beauty, and in the Phaedo the path is viewed as the pilgrimage of the philosopher through death to the world of eternal truth.

Late Works

Many of the late dialogues are devoted to technical philosophic issues. The most important of these are the Theaetetus; the Parmenides, which deals with the relation between the one and the many; and the Sophist, which discusses the nature of nonbeing. Plato's longest work, the Laws, written during his middle and late periods, discusses in practical terms the nature of the state.

Bibliography

See translation of the dialogues by B. Jowett, ed. by D. J. Allan and H. E. Daley (4 vol., 4th ed., rev. 1953); A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (1927); R. Bambrough, ed., New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (1965); G. Vlastos, Platonic Studies (1973); G. F. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry (1987); Jacob A. Kline, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (1989); C. Hampton, Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being: An Analysis of Plato's Philebus (1990).

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Plato

 orig. Aristocles

Plato, Roman herm probably copied from a Greek original, 4th century BC. In the Staatliche …

(credit: Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

(born 428/427, Athens, or Aegina, Greece—died 348/347 BC, Athens) Greek philosopher, who with his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture. His family was highly distinguished; his father claimed descent from the last king of Athens, and his mother was related to Critias and Charmides, extremist leaders of the oligarchic terror of 404. Plato (whose acquired name refers to his broad forehead, and thus his range of knowledge) must have known Socrates from boyhood. After Socrates was put to death in 401, Plato fled Athens for Megara, then spent the next 12 years in travel. Upon his return, he founded the Academy, an institute of scientific and philosophical research, where Aristotle was one of his students. Building on but also departing from Socrates' thought, he developed a profound and wide-ranging philosophical system, subsequently known as Platonism. His thought has logical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects, but much of its underlying motivation is ethical. It is presented in his many dialogues, in most of which Socrates plays a leading role. See also Neoplatonism.

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PLATO

(1) (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) Developed by Donald Bitzer and originally marketed by CDC, it was the first CBT system to combine graphics and touch-sensitive screens for interactive training.

(2) The code name for Microsoft's OLAP extensions to SQL Server. See Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services.

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Plato

?427--?347 bc, Greek philosopher: with his teacher Socrates and his pupil Aristotle, he is regarded as the initiator of western philosophy. His influential theory of ideas, which makes a distinction between objects of sense perception and the universal ideas or forms of which they are an expression, is formulated in such dialogues as Phaedo, Symposium, and The Republic. Other works include The Apology and Laws

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Plato (427–347 B.C.)

founder of the Academy; author of Republic. [Gk. Hist.: NCE, 2165]

See : Philosophy

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Plato

(427–347 B.C.) Greek philosopher revered for wisdom. [Gk. Hist.: NCE, 2165]

See : Wisdom