Plato | Life, Philosophy, & Works
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Constance C. Meinwald
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher who produced works of unparalleled influence.
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Encyclopedia Britannica
Plato (born 428/427 bce, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 bce), teacher of Aristotle (384–322 bce), and founder of the Academy. He is best known as the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence and is one of the major figures of Classical antiquity.

Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts in ethical matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato introduced the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with a class of entities he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice, Beauty, and Equality. Whereas other thinkers—and Plato himself in certain passages—used the term without any precise technical force, Plato in the course of his career came to devote specialized attention to these entities. As he conceived them, they were accessible not to the senses but to the mind alone, and they were the most important constituents of reality, underlying the existence of the sensible world and giving it what intelligibility it has. In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them (the Good, or the One); in ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also habituation to healthy emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His works also contain discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly conceived but in a wide range of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or scientific.

Life

The son of Ariston (his father) and Perictione (his mother), Plato was born in the year after the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. His brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus are portrayed as interlocutors in Plato’s masterpiece the Republic, and his half brother Antiphon figures in the Parmenides. Plato’s family was aristocratic and distinguished: his father’s side claimed descent from the god Poseidon, and his mother’s side was related to the lawgiver Solon (c. 630–560 bce). Less creditably, his mother’s close relatives Critias and Charmides were among the Thirty Tyrants who seized power in Athens and ruled briefly until the restoration of democracy in 403.

Plato as a young man was a member of the circle around Socrates. Since the latter wrote nothing, what is known of his characteristic activity of engaging his fellow citizens (and the occasional itinerant celebrity) in conversation derives wholly from the writings of others, most notably Plato himself. The works of Plato commonly referred to as “Socratic” represent the sort of thing the historical Socrates was doing. He would challenge men who supposedly had expertise about some facet of human excellence to give accounts of these matters—variously of courage, piety, and so on, or at times of the whole of “virtue”—and they typically failed to maintain their position. Resentment against Socrates grew, leading ultimately to his trial and execution on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in 399. Plato was profoundly affected by both the life and the death of Socrates. The activity of the older man provided the starting point of Plato’s philosophizing. Moreover, if Plato’s Seventh Letter is to be believed (its authorship is disputed), the treatment of Socrates by both the oligarchy and the democracy made Plato wary of entering public life, as someone of his background would normally have done.

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An Odyssey of Grecian Literature

After the death of Socrates, Plato may have traveled extensively in Greece, Italy, and Egypt, though on such particulars the evidence is uncertain. The followers of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 bce) seem to have influenced his philosophical program (they are criticized in the Phaedo and the Republic but receive respectful mention in the Philebus). It is thought that his three trips to Syracuse in Sicily (many of the Letters concern these, though their authenticity is controversial) led to a deep personal attachment to Dion (408–354 bce), brother-in-law of Dionysius the Elder (430–367 bce), the tyrant of Syracuse. Plato, at Dion’s urging, apparently undertook to put into practice the ideal of the “philosopher-king” (described in the Republic) by educating Dionysius the Younger; the project was not a success, and in the ensuing instability Dion was murdered.

Plato’s Academy, founded in the 380s, was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university (hence the English term academic); an influential centre of research and learning, it attracted many men of outstanding ability. The great mathematicians Theaetetus (417–369 bce) and Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 395–c. 342 bce) were associated with it. Although Plato was not a research mathematician, he was aware of the results of those who were, and he made use of them in his own work. For 20 years Aristotle was also a member of the Academy. He started his own school, the Lyceum, only after Plato’s death, when he was passed over as Plato’s successor at the Academy, probably because of his connections to the court of Macedonia.

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Because Aristotle often discusses issues by contrasting his views with those of his teacher, it is easy to be impressed by the ways in which they diverge. Thus, whereas for Plato the crown of ethics is the good in general, or Goodness itself (the Good), for Aristotle it is the good for human beings; and whereas for Plato the genus to which a thing belongs possesses a greater reality than the thing itself, for Aristotle the opposite is true. Plato’s emphasis on the ideal, and Aristotle’s on the worldly, informs Raphael’s depiction of the two philosophers in the School of Athens (1508–11). But if one considers the two philosophers not just in relation to each other but in the context of the whole of Western philosophy, it is clear how much Aristotle’s program is continuous with that of his teacher. (Indeed, the painting may be said to represent this continuity by showing the two men conversing amicably.) In any case, the Academy did not impose a dogmatic orthodoxy and in fact seems to have fostered a spirit of independent inquiry; at a later time it took on a skeptical orientation.

Plato once delivered a public lecture, “On the Good,” in which he mystified his audience by announcing, “the Good is one.” He better gauged his readers in his dialogues, many of which are accessible, entertaining, and inviting. Although Plato is well known for his negative remarks about much great literature, in the Symposium he depicts literature and philosophy as the offspring of lovers, who gain a more lasting posterity than do parents of mortal children. His own literary and philosophical gifts ensure that something of Plato will live on for as long as readers engage with his works.

Dating, editing, translation

Plato’s works are traditionally arranged in a manner deriving from Thrasyllus of Alexandria (flourished 1st century ce): 36 works (counting the Letters as one) are divided into nine groups of four. But the ordering of Thrasyllus makes no sense for a reader today. Unfortunately, the order of composition of Plato’s works cannot be known. Conjecture regarding chronology has been based on two kinds of consideration: perceived development in content and “stylometry,” or the study of special features of prose style, now executed with the aid of computers. By combining the two kinds of consideration, scholars have arrived at a widely used rough grouping of works, labeled with the traditional designations of early, middle, and late dialogues. These groups can also be thought of as the Socratic works (based on the activities of the historical Socrates), the literary masterpieces, and the technical studies (see below Works individually described).

Each of Plato’s dialogues has been transmitted substantially as he left it. However, it is important to be aware of the causal chain that connects modern readers to Greek authors of Plato’s time. To survive until the era of printing, an ancient author’s words had to be copied by hand, and the copies had to be copied, and so on over the course of centuries—by which time the original would have long perished. The copying process inevitably resulted in some corruption, which is often shown by disagreement between rival manuscript traditions.

Even if some Platonic “urtext” had survived, however, it would not be anything like what is published in a modern edition of Plato’s works. Writing in Plato’s time did not employ word divisions and punctuation or the present-day distinction between capital and lowercase letters. These features represent the contributions of scholars of many generations and countries, as does the ongoing attempt to correct for corruption. (Important variant readings and suggestions are commonly printed at the bottom of each page of text, forming the apparatus criticus.) In the great majority of cases only one decision is possible, but there are instances—some of crucial importance—where several courses can be adopted and where the resulting readings have widely differing import. Thus, the preparation of an edition of Plato’s works involves an enormous interpretive component. The work of the translator imports another layer of similar judgments. Some Greek sentences admit of several fundamentally different grammatical construals with widely differing senses, and many ancient Greek words have no neat English equivalents.

A notable artifact of the work of translators and scholars is a device of selective capitalization sometimes employed in English. To mark the objects of Plato’s special interest, the forms, some follow a convention in which one capitalizes the term Form (or Idea) as well as the names of particular forms, such as Justice, the Good, and so on. Others have employed a variant of this convention in which capitalization is used to indicate a special way in which Plato is supposed to have thought of the forms during a certain period (i.e., as “separate” from sensible particulars, the nature of this separation then being the subject of interpretative controversy). Still others do not use capital letters for any such purpose. Readers will do best to keep in mind that such devices are in any case only suggestions.

In recent centuries there have been some changes in the purpose and style of English translations of ancient philosophy. The great Plato translation by Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), for example, was not intended as a tool of scholarship; anyone who would undertake such a study already knew ancient Greek. Instead, it made Plato’s corpus generally accessible in English prose of considerable merit. At the other extreme was a type of translation that aimed to be useful to serious students and professional philosophers who did not know Greek; its goal was to indicate as clearly as possible the philosophical potentialities of the text, however much readability suffered in consequence. Exemplars of this style, which was much in vogue in the second half of the 20th century, are the series published by the Clarendon Press and also, in a different tradition, the translations undertaken by followers of Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Except in a few cases, however, the gains envisioned by this notion of fidelity proved to be elusive.

Despite, but also because of, the many factors that mediate the contemporary reader’s access to Plato’s works, many dialogues are conveyed quite well in translation. This is particularly true of the short, Socratic dialogues. In the case of works that are large-scale literary masterpieces, such as the Phaedrus, a translation of course cannot match the artistry of the original. Finally, because translators of difficult technical studies such as the Parmenides and the Sophist must make basic interpretive decisions in order to render any English at all, reading their work is very far from reading Plato. In the case of these dialogues, familiarity with commentaries and other secondary literature and a knowledge of ancient Greek are highly desirable.