Plato
Ancient Greek · Europe · 428 to 348 BCE
Student of Socrates who argued that lasting truths about justice and the good can be reached through reason, and founded the Academy.
What it is
Plato was an Athenian philosopher of the fourth century BCE, a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. He wrote his philosophy as dialogues, conversations in which Socrates usually leads the questioning, and he is best known for the idea that the things we see and touch are only copies of a more real, unchanging world of Forms. Few writers in the history of Western philosophy match his range or his influence.
He was born in the late 420s BCE into a high-standing Athenian family and died around 347 BCE. The sources give slightly different years for his birth, and they agree that little can be known for certain about his early life.
The main ideas
- The Forms. The world we sense is in some way defective, filled with error and change. Behind it lies a more real and perfect realm of Forms, eternal and changeless, such as Goodness, Beauty and Equality. A beautiful thing is beautiful because it shares in what Beauty itself is. Nearly everything Plato wrote depends on this distinction between the many things called good or beautiful and the one thing that goodness or beauty really is.
- Knowing the Good. To understand which things are good, and why, we have to ask what goodness itself is. Yet Plato describes the Form of the Good as something of a mystery, whose nature nobody yet fully knows.
- Love as a longing. He saw love as driven by a longing for the highest Form of beauty, the Beautiful Itself. That is the origin of the phrase Platonic love.
- One connected subject. Ethics, politics, the mind, knowledge and the nature of reality are treated as parts of a single system of questions, and not as separate subjects.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who is asked what courage is. They offer examples: a soldier who stands his ground, a patient who faces an operation. A Platonic question follows: what do all these have in common that makes each of them courageous? The question is not about one more example but about the thing itself. The method of asking it, in conversation, by testing each answer against cases, is the Socratic habit that Plato's dialogues preserve and extend.
The dialogues
Plato's works are written as dialogues, and in almost all of them Socrates is the main speaker. That makes them hard to read as plain statements of his own opinions. Scholars do not agree on which works are authentic or in what order they were written. The earliest dialogues are generally taken to be the best evidence about the real Socrates, while the middle and later ones, including the Republic, are generally taken to give Plato's own philosophy.
The dialogues also raise doubts about their own teaching. Plato asks how the Forms could be known at all, and how we could talk about them without contradicting ourselves. Many of his best readers say this restlessness is part of what he means to teach.
Questions and criticism
- Did his views change? Readers ask whether he changed his mind about the Forms and about politics between his earlier and later works, or whether the differences are only differences of emphasis.
- Are the Forms really there? If the Forms are not in space or time, it is fair to ask how we could know them, and what exactly it means for an everyday thing to copy one. Plato himself raises this kind of question.
- Whose voice is it? Because he wrote dialogues and never spoke in his own name, it is hard to be sure which view is his and which belongs to a character.
Close neighbours
Plato was a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, who later went his own way. Because he gives reason, not the senses, the route to what is most real, he is often discussed beside the rationalists of the seventeenth century, though they are a separate tradition.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Philosophies they belong to or are close to
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Al-Farabi · Al-Farabi's ideal city follows Plato's Republic closely.
- Al-Razi · He took Plato as a main guide on the soul and on the aim of becoming like the divine by reason. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Alain Badiou · He has written a version of Plato's Republic and calls himself a Platonist of the multiple.
- Aristotle · Aristotle studied in Plato's Academy for about twenty years before breaking with several of his teachings.
- Augustine of Hippo · Augustine read Plato through the Neoplatonists and took over the idea of a changeless truth known by the mind.
- Boethius · The Consolation of Philosophy is built on Platonic ideas of the good and the soul.
- Carneades · He led the Academy that Plato founded, though he turned it toward doubt.
- Emmanuel Levinas · Levinas took the idea of a good beyond being from Plato's Republic.
- Iris Murdoch · Her book on the Good draws on Plato's picture of the Good as a sun.
- Philo of Alexandria · He read scripture through Plato's philosophy and used his ideas of forms and the soul.
- Plotinus · Plotinus saw himself as an interpreter of Plato.
- Simone Weil · Weil read Plato as a spiritual guide and drew on his images of the good and of attention.
- Suhrawardi · Suhrawardi claimed the ancient Greek and Persian sages, Plato among them, as forerunners of his school.
Influenced by
- Heraclitus · Plato absorbed the idea that the sensible world is always changing and used it to argue for stable forms.
- Parmenides · Plato's later dialogues wrestle with Parmenides' claims about being and unity.
- Pythagoras · Plato took over the Pythagorean interest in mathematics and in the soul's fate.
- Socrates · Plato was Socrates' student and made him the main voice of his dialogues.
Reacted against
- Gorgias · Plato's dialogue on him attacks speech that persuades without caring for the truth.
- Protagoras · Plato argued against the claim that a person is the measure of all things.
Reacted against by
- Aristotle · Aristotle rejected Plato's separate realm of forms in favour of forms found in things.
- Karl Popper · The Open Society and Its Enemies criticises Plato as a forerunner of closed rule.
Other Ancient Greek thinkers
- Thales of Miletus · 624 to 546 BCE
- Anaximander · 610 to 546 BCE
- Anaximenes · 586 to 526 BCE
- Pythagoras · 570 to 495 BCE
- Xenophanes · 570 to 475 BCE
- Heraclitus · 535 to 475 BCE
- Parmenides · 515 to 450 BCE
- Anaxagoras · 500 to 428 BCE
- Empedocles · 494 to 434 BCE
- Zeno of Elea · 490 to 430 BCE