Titans of History

PLATO

c. 428–347 BC

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Plato

Pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, Plato showed such vision and originality in his thinking that he stands as the second and central figure in the great triumvirate that laid the foundations of Western thought.

Born to a noble Athenian family, Plato could trace his ancestry back to the last kings of Athens. He was a disciple and fervent admirer of the plebeian Socrates, whose refusal to toe the line and temper his ideas brought about his enforced suicide for impiety and corruption of youth in 399 BC.

Disappointed by the demagogic democracy of Athens, Plato traveled abroad, to Italy and to Syracuse. On his return to Athens he founded the Academy in 387 BC, an institution that trained the greatest thinkers of the next generation, of which Aristotle was the brightest star. Teaching at the Academy until his death forty years later, Plato wrote his greatest works, including the many Socratic dialogues featuring his inspirational tutor and the monumental Republic, in which he outlines the ideal state.

It has been said that Western philosophy exists as footnotes to Plato. An extreme rationalist, Plato was a proponent of the philosopher-ruler of the Republic, who would reign only according to reason. But as experience suggested that no man was capable of such restraint, he proposed that laws must rigidly circumscribe a ruler’s actions. He adopted the ideas of Socrates in arguing that the good is an immutable and fundamental concept or “form.” While opinion may shift, Plato argued, knowledge is eternal and unchanging; goodness is objective, inextricably linked to justice and personal well-being.

Plato was the first major thinker to express the idea that the higher functions of the mind (psyche) are, or should be, in control of the base passions and appetites of the body. His belief that the soul is a prisoner inside the body was countered by Aristotle’s view that it is an inherent part of the body. However despite these differences in their philosophy, his disciple Aristotle so esteemed Plato that he considered it “blasphemy in the extreme even to praise” such a genius.