Platonism
Plato
Πλάτων
c. 428 BCE – c. 348 BCEHistorically documented person
Athenian philosopher of the fourth century BC, pupil of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle and founder of the Academy. His surviving work, preserved in full, consists of dialogues in which Socrates usually leads the conversation: they set out the theory of Forms, the immortality of the soul, the ascent through love towards beauty, and the idea of a city governed by those who know the Good. Almost all Western philosophy, and much of Christian, Jewish and Islamic mysticism, has been thought in conversation with him.
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Busto de Platón (Museos Capitolinos, MC 1377) · CC BY 2.5
In their words
«He knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.»Apología de Sócrates 21d (habla Sócrates). Español: traducción literal propia desde el griego (ed. Burnet). Inglés: Jowett, 1892 (dominio público).
Their central idea
Theory of Forms (Ideas): Plato holds that, besides sensible things, which are many and changing, there exist intelligible realities, eternal and unchanging — the Forms or Ideas (eidos, idea) — such as the Beautiful itself, the Just itself or the Equal itself.
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Biography
5 min read
An aristocrat in wartime Athens
Plato was born in Athens around 428 or 427 BC, in the first years of the Peloponnesian War, into one of the city's oldest families. His father, Ariston, claimed descent from King Codrus; his mother, Perictione, was related to Solon. He had two older brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, to whom he would give voice in the Republic, and a sister, Potone, mother of his successor Speusippus. After Ariston's death, Perictione married her uncle Pyrilampes, a friend of Pericles. The boy thus grew up among people accustomed to rule: Critias, his mother's cousin, and Charmides, his uncle, would be central figures in the oligarchic regime of the Thirty.
Little is known for certain about his education. Diogenes Laertius, writing six centuries later, reports that his real name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' was a nickname owed to the breadth of his shoulders or of his forehead; that he practised wrestling, painting and poetry; and that he burned his tragedies on hearing Socrates. These are reports of Hellenistic biographers who mixed tradition, inference from the dialogues and plain invention, and modern scholarship treats them with caution.
The wound of 399
What does seem firm is that in his youth Plato belonged to the circle of Socrates, and that this relationship decided his life. The Seventh Letter, whose authenticity is disputed but which many specialists accept, relates that as a young man he meant to enter politics, that the Thirty invited him to join them, and that their violence — including the attempt to involve Socrates in arresting a citizen for execution — turned him away. Once democracy was restored, in 399 BC the new leaders brought Socrates to trial for impiety and corrupting the young, and he was condemned to drink hemlock.
Plato was present at the trial, as he himself notes in the Apology, though the Phaedo has him absent, ill, on the day of the death. According to the letter, that outcome led him to the conclusion that runs through all his work: cities will not cease from evil until philosophers rule or rulers truly philosophise. After the execution he took refuge for a while in Megara, with the Socratic Euclides.
Journeys and the Academy
Ancient sources then credit him with journeys to Cyrene, to the Italy of the Pythagoreans and to Egypt. Only the contact with the Pythagoreans is well documented: at about forty he visited southern Italy, befriended Archytas of Tarentum and went on to Syracuse, where he met Dion, brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius I. The story that the tyrant had him sold as a slave in Aegina, and that a Cyrenaic ransomed him, comes from late biographers and does not appear in the Seventh Letter.
Back in Athens, around 387 BC, he established his school beside the gymnasium of the Academy, a wooded precinct sacred to the hero Academus north-west of the city. It was not a university in the modern sense but a community of study and shared life, where mathematics, astronomy, dialectic and political theory were pursued, and where mathematicians such as Theaetetus and Eudoxus worked. Aristotle arrived in 367 BC, aged seventeen, and stayed some twenty years. Diogenes Laertius even names two women, Axiothea of Phlius and Lastheneia of Mantinea, among its pupils.
The temptation of Sicily
Plato's political philosophy had a real test. In 367 BC, after Dionysius I died, Dion asked him to come and educate the new tyrant, Dionysius II, in the hope of turning him into the philosopher-ruler of the Republic. The experiment ended with Dion exiled and Plato back in Athens. Around 361 he returned to Syracuse to try to reconcile them, was held against his will and could leave only thanks to Archytas. In 357 Dion overthrew Dionysius with support from members of the Academy, and in 354 he was murdered by Callippus, an Athenian of his own circle. The Seventh and Eighth Letters present themselves as the reckoning of that failure.
The dialogues
Unlike almost all earlier philosophers, whose work we know in fragments, everything antiquity ascribed to Plato has survived: thirty-five dialogues and a collection of thirteen letters, arranged in the first century AD by Thrasyllus in nine tetralogies, along with a handful of works already recognised as spurious. Plato never speaks in them in his own person; Socrates usually leads the conversation, and in the late works he yields the role to an Eleatic Stranger, to Timaeus or to an Athenian Stranger.
The chronology is debated, but there is agreement on a general outline. Short dialogues such as the Laches or the Euthyphro examine a virtue and end without an answer. The Phaedo, Symposium, Republic and Phaedrus set out the theory of Forms, the immortality of the soul and the ascent of love towards Beauty. The Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Philebus and the Laws — left uncopied at his death — subject those ideas to criticism and extend them to cosmology and legislation.
The Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter add a warning about writing itself: what matters most is not passed on in books but is kindled in the soul after long companionship. Aristotle alludes to 'unwritten doctrines' of his master, and the famous public lecture 'On the Good', in which Plato spoke about mathematics and concluded that the Good is One, left its audience baffled. How much of his thought lay outside the dialogues remains one of the great debates of Platonic studies.
Death and legacy
Plato died in Athens in 348 or 347 BC, aged about eighty, and was buried in the Academy. The sources disagree on the circumstances: a wedding feast, the labour of writing, a feverish night listening to a flute. He was succeeded by his nephew Speusippus, and the school, profoundly transformed, endured for centuries.
The text reached print through the Byzantine codices — the oldest to preserve the first six tetralogies complete, the Bodleian Clarkianus, was copied in 895 — and in 1578 Henri Estienne published in Geneva the edition whose pagination is still used to cite him: 'Republic 514a' refers to page 514, section a, of that volume. In Spanish, Patricio de Azcárate produced the first translation of the complete works between 1871 and 1872.
His influence has no equivalent. Plotinus regarded himself as his interpreter and founded Neoplatonism; Augustine of Hippo acknowledged that the Platonic books opened his way to the Christian God; the Timaeus, in Latin, was for centuries almost all the West read of him, and Islamic falsafa and medieval Jewish theology received him by paths of their own. Marsilio Ficino's complete Latin translation, in 1484, restored him to the centre of European culture. Alfred North Whitehead summed up the debt when he wrote that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Sources: Diógenes Laercio, Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro III (Platón), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925 (texto en Wikisource). · Platón (atribuida), Carta VII, 324a–352a, en Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. V, Oxford Classical Texts, 1907; trad. española de Juan Zaragoza y Pilar Gómez Cardó en Platón, Diálogos VII, Madrid, Gredos (Biblioteca Clásica Gredos 162), 1992. · Cooper, John M. (ed.) y Hutchinson, D. S. (ed. asociado), Plato: Complete Works, Indianápolis, Hackett, 1997 (introducción del editor sobre el corpus, las tetralogías de Trasilo y la autenticidad de cada obra). · Nails, Debra, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics, Indianápolis, Hackett, 2002 (entrada «Plato» y apéndices cronológicos). · Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato, Leiden, Brill (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 3), 1976.
Timeline
A life, year by year
Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.
c. 428 BCEage 0Atenas (o Egina, según otra tradición)
Birth
Born into an aristocratic Athenian family: his father, Ariston, claimed descent from King Codrus; his mother, Perictione, from Solon's family. Diogenes Laertius dates the birth to the 88th Olympiad (428/427 BC), and Apollodorus has it coincide with Apollo's birthday. He had two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone.
ProbableDiógenes Laercio, Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro III (Platón), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925 (texto en Wikisource).
After their death
- c. 347 BCESpeusippus heads the Academy
- c. 14 BCEThrasyllus' tetralogies
- 895The Codex Clarkianus
- 1484Ficino's Latin translation
- 1578The Stephanus edition
- 1871 – 1872Complete works in Spanish
c. 428 BCE · age 0
Birth
Born into an aristocratic Athenian family: his father, Ariston, claimed descent from King Codrus; his mother, Perictione, from Solon's family. Diogenes Laertius dates the birth to the 88th Olympiad (428/427 BC), and Apollodorus has it coincide with Apollo's birthday. He had two brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone.
Probable
c. 423 BCE · age 5
His mother marries Pyrilampes
After Ariston's death, Perictione marries her uncle Pyrilampes, a friend of Pericles; from this marriage is born Antiphon, Plato's half-brother, who appears in the Parmenides.
Probable
c. 408 BCE · age 20
With Socrates
According to Diogenes Laertius, at twenty he began to frequent Socrates; tradition adds that he then burned his tragedies. The date and the burning episode are traditional.
Tradition
404 BCE · age 24
The Thirty Tyrants
After Athens' defeat, an oligarchic government including Critias, his mother's cousin, and Charmides, his uncle, invites the young Plato to collaborate. According to the Seventh Letter, its violence — and its attempt to involve Socrates in an unjust arrest — turned him away.
Probable
399 BCE · age 29
Trial and death of Socrates
Socrates is condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the young. Plato attends the trial, as he states in the Apology (34a, 38b), but according to the Phaedo (59b) he was not present at the death because he was ill.
Documented
c. 399 BCE · age 29
Withdrawal to Megara
After the execution, with other Socratics, he takes refuge for a while in Megara with Euclides, according to Hermodorus as cited by Diogenes Laertius.
Probable
c. 395 BCE · age 33
Journeys of study
Ancient tradition credits him with journeys to Cyrene, to the mathematician Theodorus, to the Pythagoreans of Italy and to Egypt. Only the contact with the Pythagoreans is well attested; the Egyptian journey is doubtful.
Tradition
c. 388 BCE · age 40
First journey to Sicily
Around the age of forty (Seventh Letter, 324a) he visits Italy, where he befriends Archytas of Tarentum, and the court of Dionysius I in Syracuse, where he meets the young Dion. Later tradition relates that the tyrant had him sold as a slave in Aegina.
Probable
c. 387 BCE · age 41
Founding of the Academy
He acquires land near the gymnasium of the Academy, north-west of Athens, and founds the community of study that will take its name. Mathematics, astronomy, dialectic and politics are studied there; it will survive, with transformations, for several centuries.
Probable
367 BCE · age 61
Aristotle enters the Academy
Aristotle, aged seventeen, arrives from Stagira and remains in the Academy for some twenty years, until Plato's death.
Documented
c. 367 BCE – 365 BCE · age 61
Second journey to Sicily
After Dionysius I's death, Dion calls him to educate the new tyrant, Dionysius II. The experiment fails: Dion is exiled and Plato returns to Athens.
Probable
c. 361 BCE – 360 BCE · age 67
Third journey to Sicily
He returns to Syracuse at Dionysius II's request, hoping to reconcile him with Dion. Held against his will, he manages to leave thanks to the intervention of Archytas of Tarentum.
Probable
357 BCE · age 71
Dion's expedition
Dion, with support from members of the Academy, overthrows Dionysius II. In 354 BC he is murdered by Callippus, an Athenian of his circle. Letters VII and VIII present themselves as written after his death.
Probable
c. 348 BCE · age 80
Death
He dies in Athens in the first year of the 108th Olympiad (348/347 BC), aged about eighty or eighty-one, according to Hermippus as cited by Diogenes Laertius. He is buried in the Academy. He leaves the Laws not yet fair-copied.
Probable
c. 347 BCE
Speusippus heads the Academy
He is succeeded by his nephew Speusippus, son of his sister Potone. Aristotle leaves Athens.
Documented
c. 14 BCE
Thrasyllus' tetralogies
In the first century AD, the astrologer Thrasyllus, close to Tiberius, arranges the works in nine tetralogies, the order in which the corpus has come down to us.
Probable
895
The Codex Clarkianus
John the Calligrapher copies for Arethas of Caesarea the codex now preserved in the Bodleian Library, the main witness for the first six tetralogies.
Documented
1484
Ficino's Latin translation
Marsilio Ficino publishes the first complete Latin translation of the dialogues, commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, which restores Plato to the centre of European thought.
Documented
1578
The Stephanus edition
Henri Estienne publishes the Greek text in three volumes with Jean de Serres' Latin translation; its pagination becomes the universal system of reference.
Documented
1871 – 1872
Complete works in Spanish
Patricio de Azcárate publishes the first Spanish translation of the complete works (11 volumes, 1871–1872).
Documented
Works
Essential works
The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.
Written work · c. 395 BCE
Apology of Socrates
Ἀπολογία Σωκράτους
A recreation of the defence speech Socrates delivered in 399 BC before the Athenian popular jury, accused of not recognising the city's gods and of corrupting the young. Socrates explains the Delphic oracle, his mission of examining those who think they know, and his conscious ignorance; after the verdict he ironically proposes to be maintained in the Prytaneum, and accepts death declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato was present at the trial (34a, 38b). It is the classic doorway into philosophy.
8 editions
Written work · c. 380 BCE
Phaedo
Φαίδων
Phaedo of Elis tells Echecrates of Socrates' last hours in prison: the conversation on why the philosopher does not fear death, the arguments for the immortality of the soul (from opposites, recollection, affinity with the invisible, participation in Forms), the closing myth on the fate of souls, and the calm death by hemlock. Here the theory of Forms appears explicitly, as does the definition of philosophy as practice for dying. Plato is said to have been absent through illness (59b).
9 editions
Written work · c. 380 BCE
Symposium
Συμπόσιον
At the house of the poet Agathon, celebrating his victory in the tragic contest of 416 BC, the guests deliver speeches in honour of Eros: Phaedrus, Pausanias, the physician Eryximachus, Aristophanes with the myth of spherical beings cut in two, Agathon, and Socrates, who relays the teaching of the priestess Diotima on the ladder of love, from one beautiful body to Beauty itself. It closes with the entry of a drunken Alcibiades, who delivers a eulogy of Socrates. A literary masterpiece and source of the whole Western mysticism of love.
9 editions
Written work · c. 375 BCE
Republic
Πολιτεία
In the Piraeus, after a festival, Socrates discusses what justice is. To see it writ large he imagines an ideal city with three classes, ruled by philosophers whose education culminates in knowledge of the Form of the Good. Its ten books contain the critique of poetry, the equal education of women guardians, the images of the sun, the line and the cave, the typology of degenerate regimes and the myth of Er on the choice of lives. Plato's central work and that of political philosophy.
13 editions
Complete works (57)
Euthyphro
395
Crito
395
Cratylus
385
Theaetetus
368
Sophist
360
Statesman
360
Parmenides
370
Philebus
355
Phaedrus
370
Alcibiades I
Alcibiades II
Hipparchus
Rival Lovers (Lovers)
Theages
Charmides
390
Laches
390
Lysis
390
Euthydemus
385
Protagoras
390
Gorgias
387
Meno
385
Hippias Major
390
Hippias Minor
395
Ion
395
Quotations
Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.
He knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι.
VerifiedApología de Sócrates 21d (habla Sócrates). Español: traducción literal propia desde el griego (ed. Burnet). Inglés: Jowett, 1892 (dominio público).
Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (2)
«'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.'»
An inscription attributed to the Academy's door that appears only in sixth-century AD commentators; it is not found in any work of Plato or in sources of his time.
«'Only the dead have seen the end of war.'»
A widespread false attribution: it appears in no work of Plato. It comes from George Santayana, Soliloquies in England (1922), the soliloquy 'Tipperary'; General Douglas MacArthur popularised it as Platonic in an address at West Point (1962).
Last words
There are no verifiable records of their last words.
No final words of Plato survive. The ancient sources disagree even on the circumstances of his death: Hermippus, cited by Diogenes Laertius (III 2), says he died at a wedding feast; Cicero (On Old Age 13) that he died while writing, at eighty-one; and the Herculaneum papyrus of Philodemus' Index Academicorum, which goes back through Neanthes to Philip of Opus, relates that on his last night, feverish, he received a Chaldean visitor and that a Thracian girl played the flute while he marked the rhythm for her with a gesture. None of these versions records a sentence.
Source: Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato, Leiden, Brill (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 3), 1976.
Ask
What their work answers
Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.
What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
A Good beyond being and a good craftsman who willed the world
Both personal and impersonalInferred from their doctrine
In Plato two faces of the ultimate coexist. In the Republic the Good is the source from which things receive being and knowability, and it is not essence but still beyond essence: an impersonal principle named only by analogy with the sun. In the Timaeus, by contrast, a good demiurge, free of envy, wills that everything become as like him as possible and orders the cosmos looking to an eternal model. The Laws add gods who care for small things as much as great and punish impiety. Plato does not explicitly unify the two levels; the later tradition read them as degrees of a single divine reality.
Compare this question with other teachersWho am I? Is there a true self?
The immortal soul, akin to the Forms, imprisoned in the body
A created, immortal soulStated explicitly
Plato identifies the human being with the soul and devotes his most famous proofs to it. In the Phaedo the soul is like the divine, immortal, intelligible and always the same as itself, while the body resembles the mortal and changing; to philosophise is to separate it from the body. The Phaedrus defines it as a self-moving principle of motion that therefore is neither born nor dies. In the Timaeus the demiurge fashions the immortal part of the human soul from the same mixture as the world soul and entrusts it to the lesser gods. Its destiny is to become like God as far as possible. Yet Plato also ascribes successive reincarnations to this soul.
Compare this question with other teachersWhy do we suffer?
Injustice is a civil war in the soul, and the body feeds it
Social and moral disorderStated explicitly
Plato gives two complementary explanations. In the Phaedo the body fills the soul with loves, desires, fears and images, and from its needs arise wars, revolts and fights over money. In the Republic evil is thought of as disorder: the soul has three parts, reason, spirit and appetite, and justice consists in each doing its own work under reason's rule; injustice is an inner uprising, a sickness of the soul. The same holds for the city, whose degenerate forms correspond to disordered souls. We suffer when order is inverted and appetite rules, in the soul and in the city.
Compare this question with other teachersWhat happens after death?
The immortal soul is judged and reborn until philosophy frees it
Rebirth according to karmaStated explicitly
Plato upholds the immortality of the soul with arguments and describes it with myths. In the Phaedo philosophy is a practice of dying, because it prepares the soul to separate from the body; souls attached to it are reincarnated according to their habits, as asses, wolves or bees, while those purified by philosophy live with the gods. The Phaedrus tells of a ten-thousand-year cycle in which only the philosopher's soul regains its wings sooner. In the myth of Er, at the end of the Republic, judged souls choose their next life and drink from the river of forgetfulness. Plato warns that the form of the tale is approximate but that the risk of believing it is worth taking.
Compare this question with other teachersHow is liberation or salvation attained?
Turning the whole soul towards what is and becoming like God
Through direct knowledgeStated explicitly
For Plato liberation is a conversion of knowledge. The allegory of the cave presents humans chained before shadows; education does not consist in putting knowledge into the soul but in turning it whole, away from what becomes, until it can bear the contemplation of what is and of the Good. The way passes through mathematics and culminates in dialectic. The Phaedo calls philosophy purification and a practice of dying; the Symposium describes an ascent of love from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself; the Theaetetus sums up the goal as flight from here to there, which is becoming like God by becoming just and holy with understanding.
Compare this question with other teachersIs a teacher necessary?
Truth catches after long companionship, like a spark that leaps
Community and traditionStated explicitly
Plato founded the Academy, a community of study and life, and in his dialogues learning always happens between persons. The Seventh Letter, of disputed authenticity but very old, states the idea precisely: the essential cannot be put into words like other studies, but after long companionship with the matter itself and a shared life, it is suddenly born in the soul like a light kindled from a leaping spark. The Phaedrus criticises writing because it cannot answer the questioner and prefers the living word sown in a suitable soul. In the cave, someone has to unchain the prisoner and force him upward. Knowledge is passed on in a prolonged relationship, not in a book.
Compare this question with other teachersIs the world real?
The sensible always becomes and never fully is: an image of what is
Appearance over the one realityStated explicitly
Plato distinguishes what always is and never becomes, grasped by thought, from what always becomes and never fully is, the object of opinion and the senses. In the allegory of the cave the prisoners take projected shadows for reality; the divided line grades the levels of reality from images up to the Forms. But the sensible world is not nothing: in the Timaeus it is the work of a good craftsman, the most beautiful of generated things, an image of the intelligible which the dialogue's last sentence calls a perceptible god. The world is real as an image; the fully real are the Forms and, above them, the Good.
Compare this question with other teachersWhat is love?
Eros ascends from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself
Longing and unionStated explicitly
Plato makes love a force of ascent. In the Symposium, Diotima explains that Eros is not a god but an intermediary, child of Resource and Poverty, always lacking and always seeking; he desires the beautiful because he desires the good and immortality. Rightly guided, he climbs by degrees: from one beautiful body to all, from bodies to souls, to laws, to sciences, until suddenly beholding Beauty itself, the moment when, if ever, life is worth living. The Phaedrus describes love as divine madness: the sight of the beloved reminds the soul of the beauty it beheld before birth and makes its wings grow. To love is to remember the origin and return to it.
Compare this question with other teachersAre we free, or is everything determined?
The responsibility is the chooser's; the god is not responsible
Karma and choiceStated explicitly
The myth of Er, at the end of the Republic, is Plato's great image on this question. Souls, before being reborn, choose their next life from many patterns; a prophet proclaims that virtue has no master, that each will have more or less of it as he honours or scorns it, and that the responsibility is the chooser's, not the god's. But the choice is not neutral: most choose according to the habits of their former life, and once made, the Fates render it irrevocable. The Laws likewise hold that God left to our wills the causes of our being one way or another. The past conditions choice but does not replace it.
Compare this question with other teachersWhy meditate or pray?
Turning the soul towards what is until it contemplates the Good
Seeing reality as it isStated explicitly
Plato proposes no meditation techniques, but contemplation is the centre of his philosophy. True education consists in turning the whole soul from what becomes until it can bear the sight of what is; the ascent of the Symposium culminates in the sudden contemplation of Beauty itself; the Phaedo describes philosophy as the soul's gathering into itself, away from the senses, to see the truth. Nor does Plato neglect prayer: the Timaeus opens with the remark that everyone with a little sense invokes the divine at the start of any undertaking. But the goal is to see: to know reality as it is.
Compare this question with other teachersCan reason know the ultimate?
After dialectic, the ultimate is born in the soul like a leaping spark
The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly
Plato trusts reason as few have: dialectic is the only method that ascends to the unhypothetical principle. But at the summit language falls short. The Good is beyond essence, and Socrates in the Republic declines to say what it is and offers only an image, the sun. In the Symposium Beauty itself is beheld suddenly at the end of the ascent. And the Seventh Letter states that the most serious matters cannot be put into words like other studies, but after long companionship with the subject, are born suddenly in the soul, like light kindled from a spark. Reason prepares the way; the ultimate is seen, not proved.
Compare this question with other teachersWithdraw from the world or transform it?
Until philosophers rule, there will be no respite from evils for cities
Order societyStated explicitly
Plato sought to transform the world through government. The Republic holds that there will be no respite from evils for cities until philosophers rule or kings truly philosophise; the philosopher who has left the cave and beheld the Good is obliged to go back down to govern, though he would prefer contemplation. The Seventh Letter relates how the young Plato, disillusioned with Athenian politics after Socrates' death, reached that conviction, and his journeys to Syracuse attempted to put it into practice. The Laws, his last work, design a possible city in detail. Wisdom is realised in the good order of the city and the soul.
Compare this question with other teachers
Affinities & tensions
Affinities and tensions
Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.
Thinks most like
Yajnavalkya
They agree on: What happens after death? · How is liberation or salvation attained? · Is a teacher necessary?
Meher Baba
They agree on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · What happens after death? · Is the world real?
Laozi
They agree on: Why do we suffer? · Withdraw from the world or transform it? · Why meditate or pray?
Parmenides
They agree on: How is liberation or salvation attained? · Is the world real?
Thinks most unlike
Anecdotes and stories
Anecdotes and stories
Disputedc. 410 a. C.
The name Plato
Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius III 4, citing Alexander's Successions and Neanthes. Riginos (Platonica, 1976) and Nails (2002) treat it as a probable biographical invention.
Oral traditionc. 408 a. C.
The tragedies in the fire
Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius III 5; Aelian, Varia Historia II 30. The line parodies Iliad XVIII 392. Riginos classes it among the literary conversion anecdotes.
Source: Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato, Leiden, Brill (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 3), 1976.
Hagiographic accountc. 408 a. C.
The dream of the swan
Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius III 5; also Pausanias I 30.3, Apuleius (On Plato I 1) and Olympiodorus. Riginos (1976) places it in the Apollonian cycle of Plato's biography.
Disputedc. 387 a. C.
Sold as a slave in Aegina
Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius III 18–21; Diodorus Siculus XV 7; Plutarch, Dion 5. Absent from the Seventh Letter. Riginos and Nails discuss its plausibility.
Testimonys. IV a. C.
The lecture 'On the Good'
Origin of the story: Aristoxenus, Elementa harmonica II 30–31, who transmits it as a story Aristotle often told. It is second-hand but close testimony: Aristoxenus was Aristotle's direct pupil.
Unverifiables. IV a. C. (atribuido)
'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'
Origin of the story: First mentions in sixth-century AD Alexandrian Neoplatonic commentaries (John Philoponus, In De anima; Elias, In Categorias), and in a scholion on Aelius Aristides. Riginos (1976) considers it a late invention.
Source: Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato, Leiden, Brill (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 3), 1976.
Oral traditions. IV a. C.
Plato's man
Origin of the story: Diogenes Laertius VI 40. The definition 'featherless biped' also appears in the pseudo-Platonic Definitions (415a). The anecdote circulated as a Cynic chreia, not as testimony.
Teachings
Teachings
The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.
Theory of Forms (Ideas)teoria-de-las-formas
It answers Heraclitus (the flux of the sensible) and Parmenides (only what is can be known), and Socrates' search for definitions.
The Form of the Goodidea-del-bien
It crowns the central images of the Republic (sun, line, cave).
The allegory of the cavealegoria-de-la-caverna
It completes the images of the sun and the divided line; it is the most commented page of Western philosophy.
Recollection (anamnesis)anamnesis
It has Pythagorean roots (immortality and transmigration of the soul).
Immortality and parts of the soulinmortalidad-del-alma
It takes up Orphic and Pythagorean inheritances and subjects them to philosophical argument.
Eros and the ladder of beautyeros
Expressed as the teaching of a priestess, at a banquet, among speeches; the later 'Platonic love' greatly simplifies the doctrine.
The philosopher-ruler and justicefilosofo-rey
It arises from the experience of Socrates' condemnation by the democracy and of the tyranny of the Thirty; it has been read as utopia, as critique and, in the twentieth century (Popper), as the seed of totalitarianism.
Becoming like God (homoiosis theoi)homoiosis-theo
It is the bridge between Plato's philosophy and the spirituality of later Platonisms.
Videos
Videos
Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.
2. Socratic Citizenship: Plato's Apology
Lecture· EN· 2006· 46 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
3. Socratic Citizenship: Plato's Crito
Lecture· EN· 2006· 47 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
4. Philosophers and Kings: Plato's Republic, I-II
Lecture· EN· 2006· 47 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
5. Philosophers and Kings: Plato's Republic, III-IV
Lecture· EN· 2006· 47 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
6. Philosophers and Kings: Plato's Republic, V
Lecture· EN· 2006· 45 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
Great Minds - Part 1 - Plato's Republic I: Justice, Power, and Knowledge
Lecture· EN· 46 min
Michael SugrueOfficial channel
Plato's Symposium: The Dialectic of Reason, Love, and Wisdom
Lecture· EN· 49 min
Michael SugrueOfficial channel
Socrates & Plato's Philosophy - Myles Burnyeat & Bryan Magee (1987)
Interview· EN· 1987· 44 min
Philosophy Overdose
Plato and Aristotle: Crash Course History of Science #3
Analysis· EN· 2018· 12 min
CrashCourseOfficial channel
PHILOSOPHY - The Good Life: Plato [HD]
Analysis· EN· 6 min
Wireless PhilosophyOfficial channel
Who did Plato (not) Love? Oxford Abridged Short Talks
Lecture· EN· 12 min
University of OxfordOfficial channel
Mentira la verdad IV: Platón, Apología de Sócrates - Canal Encuentro
Analysis· ES· 27 min
Canal EncuentroOfficial channel
01-03-2013. Timeo: El mito de Platón y la creación científica del mundo.
Documentary· ES· 2013· 27 min
UNEDOfficial channel
La alegoría de la caverna de Platón - Alex Gendler
Analysis· ES· 5 min
Sé Curioso — TED-EdOfficial channel
La filosofía helenística (IV): El neoplatonismo · La March
Lecture· ES· 59 min
Fundación Juan MarchOfficial channel
Gallery
Gallery
Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.
Manuscripts
Manuscripts
Manuscript witnesses and ancient texts, with their custodian and conditions of access.
GRC · Greek minuscule · s. IV a. C.
Πλάτωνος διάλογοι (tetralogías I–VI)
- Surviving witness
- Codex Clarkianus (sigla B), pergamino, año 895
- Custodian
- Bodleian Library, Oxford · MS. E. D. Clarke 39
- Digitisation
- digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/…
GRC · Greek minuscule · s. IV a. C. (espurios, ss. IV–I a. C.)
Πλάτωνος διάλογοι (tetralogías VIII–IX y espurios)
- Surviving witness
- Codex Parisinus graecus 1807 (sigla A), pergamino, s. IX
- Custodian
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, París · Grec 1807
- Digitisation
- gallica.bnf.fr/…
GRC · Greek majuscule (bookhand) · s. IV a. C.
Πολιτεία (fragmentos)
- Surviving witness
- P. Oxy. LII 3679, papiro, s. III d. C.
- Custodian
- Sackler Library / Egypt Exploration Society, Oxford · P. Oxy. 3679
- Digitisation
- commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POxy3679_Parts_P…
Connections
Connections
Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.
Disciple of
He was his companion for about ten years, attended his trial and made him the protagonist of almost all his dialogues. Distinguishing the historical Socrates from the Platonic one is one of the classic problems of ancient philosophy.
Documented relation
Teacher of
Aristotle studied and taught in the Academy for some twenty years (367–347 BC) and developed his own philosophy in critical discussion with the Platonic theory of Forms.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Aristotle (Metaphysics I 6) states that Plato followed the Pythagoreans in many things; his friendship with Archytas of Tarentum, the role of mathematics and the doctrine of the immortal soul confirm it.
Documented relation
Influenced by
According to Aristotle (Metaphysics I 6), Plato became familiar in his youth with Cratylus and the Heraclitean doctrines of flux, and concluded from them that there is no knowledge of sensible things.
Documented relation
Influenced by
The distinction between unchanging being and becoming, and the requirement that what is known must be, come from Parmenides, to whom Plato devotes a dialogue and with whom he breaks in the Sophist ('parricide').
Documented relation
Influenced
Plotinus (3rd century AD) regarded himself as a mere interpreter of Plato; Neoplatonism arose from his reading of the Parmenides, the Timaeus, the Republic and the Symposium.
Documented relation
Influenced
In the Confessions (VII 9) and the City of God (VIII) Augustine acknowledges that the 'books of the Platonists' opened his way to the Christian God; through him Platonism passed into Latin theology.
Documented relation
Influenced by
The theory of the four elements that the Timaeus reworks geometrically comes from Empedocles.
Similarity identified by analysis
Disagreed with
Diogenes Laertius (VI 40, 53–54) transmits several gibes by the Cynic against Plato, such as the plucked chicken presented as 'Plato's man'; they are anecdotes of late tradition.
Documented relation
Ideas akin to
The ascent of the soul towards a principle beyond being and conceptual knowledge has Platonic and Neoplatonic echoes in Rhineland mysticism.
Similarity identified by analysis
Influenced
Simone Weil read Plato as a mystic and devoted studies to him in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
The distinction between unchanging reality and the changing world of appearances invites comparison with Advaita, though without historical contact.
Similarity identified by analysis
Linked from other profiles
- Aristotle · Disciple of
- Plotinus · Influenced by
- Socrates · Teacher of
- Heraclitus · Influenced
- Marcus Aurelius · Influenced by
- Simone Weil · Influenced by
- Epicurus · Disagreed with
- Zeno of Citium · Disagreed with
- Nikolai Berdyaev · Disagreed with
- Empedocles · Influenced
- Diogenes of Sinope · Disagreed with
- Epictetus · Influenced by
- Parmenides · Influenced
- Pavel Florensky · Influenced by
- Pythagoras · Influenced
- Vladimir Solovyov · Influenced by
- Augustine of Hippo · Influenced by
Sources
Sources
Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.
- Wikidata, «Plato» (Q859): identidad, fechas y nombre en griego (Πλάτων).
- Diógenes Laercio, Vidas y opiniones de los filósofos ilustres, libro III (Platón), s. III d. C. Trad. inglesa de R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925 (texto en Wikisource).
- Platón (atribuida), Carta VII, 324a–352a, en Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. V, Oxford Classical Texts, 1907; trad. española de Juan Zaragoza y Pilar Gómez Cardó en Platón, Diálogos VII, Madrid, Gredos (Biblioteca Clásica Gredos 162), 1992.
- Kraut, Richard, «Plato», Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (primera versión 2004; revisión sustantiva 2022), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
- Cooper, John M. (ed.) y Hutchinson, D. S. (ed. asociado), Plato: Complete Works, Indianápolis, Hackett, 1997 (introducción del editor sobre el corpus, las tetralogías de Trasilo y la autenticidad de cada obra).
- Nails, Debra, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics, Indianápolis, Hackett, 2002 (entrada «Plato» y apéndices cronológicos).
- Riginos, Alice Swift, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato, Leiden, Brill (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 3), 1976.
- Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. IV: Plato, the Man and his Dialogues: Earlier Period (1975) y vol. V: The Later Plato and the Academy (1978), Cambridge University Press.
- Burnet, John (ed.), Platonis Opera, 5 vols., Oxford Classical Texts, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1900–1907 (texto griego citado por la paginación de Stephanus; edición digital en Perseus).
- Open Library: obras y ediciones de Platón (búsqueda por autor, título e ISBN).
- Lledó Íñigo, Emilio, «Introducción general», en Platón, Diálogos I, Madrid, Gredos (Biblioteca Clásica Gredos 37), 1981; y plan de la serie de Diálogos I–IX de la Biblioteca Clásica Gredos (1981–1999).
- Jowett, Benjamin (trad.), The Dialogues of Plato, 3.ª ed., 5 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1892 (textos en Project Gutenberg).
- Azcárate, Patricio de (trad.), Obras completas de Platón, 11 vols., Madrid, Medina y Navarro, 1871–1872 (edición digital en el Proyecto Filosofía en español y en Wikisource).
- Burnyeat, Myles y Frede, Michael, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter, ed. Dominic Scott, Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Kahn, Charles H., Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Dorandi, Tiziano (ed.), Filodemo. Storia dei filosofi: Platone e l'Academia (PHerc. 1021 e 164), Nápoles, Bibliopolis, 1991.
- Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. E. D. Clarke 39 (Codex Clarkianus, año 895): ficha y reproducción digital en Digital Bodleian.
- Aristóxeno, Elementa harmonica II 30–31 (testimonio de la lección «Sobre el Bien»), citado y comentado en Kraut, «Plato», SEP, y en Guthrie, HGP V.
- Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Grec 1807 (Codex Parisinus graecus 1807, s. IX), en Gallica.
- Suzanne, Bernard, «Did Plato write “Only the dead have seen the end of war”?», Plato and his dialogues (FAQ), 2002; cf. Santayana, George, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922, n.º 25 «Tipperary».
- Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Nueva York, Macmillan, 1929, parte II, cap. 1, sección 1 («a series of footnotes to Plato»).
- Rights holder
- Los textos griegos de Platón (s. IV a. C.) son de dominio público, como las traducciones antiguas (Jowett, 1892; Burges, 1854–1855; Azcárate, 1871–1872). Las traducciones, introducciones y notas modernas pertenecen a sus traductores y editoriales (Gredos/RBA, Alianza, Akal, Cátedra, Hackett, Harvard University Press, Penguin, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, entre otras).
Pending confirmation
What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.
- Confirmar el índice exacto de Gredos, Diálogos VII (BCG 162, 1992): se ha asumido que contiene Alcibíades I y II, Hiparco, Amantes, Teages, Clitofonte, Minos, Epínomis, los apócrifos (Definiciones, Sobre la justicia, Sobre la virtud, Demódoco, Sísifo, Erixias, Axíoco) y las Cartas; no se ha visto el índice en un catálogo. Alción no se ha asignado a ese volumen.
- Traductores de cada diálogo en los volúmenes I–III, V y VI de Gredos: no consignados por no haberlos verificado en catálogo (solo República, Eggers Lan; vol. VII, Zaragoza y Gómez Cardó).
- Ediciones con ISBN en español e inglés de varios dudosos y espurios fuera de los volúmenes generales (Hiparco, Teages, Minos, Demódoco, Sísifo, Alción): solo figuran en Gredos VII y Hackett Complete Works. Localizar el volumen Loeb XII (Charmides, Alcibiades I–II, Hipparchus, Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis, LCL 201) y el X (Laws I–VI, LCL 187), cuyos ISBN no aparecieron en Open Library.
- Alción y Demódoco/Sísifo no tienen texto castellano de dominio público localizado; Alción tampoco en inglés (está en el corpus de Luciano: buscar traducción antigua de dominio público).
- Ediciones en francés (Belles Lettres/Budé, GF Flammarion), alemán (Schleiermacher, de dominio público) e italiano: no registradas en esta versión.
- Fechas de composición: se dan años aproximados de la cronología convencional (Kahn, Kraut); no son datos documentados. Los dudosos y espurios quedan sin año salvo Epínomis y las Cartas IV, VII y VIII.
- Contenido de las páginas «Primer Alcibíades», «Ion», «Lisis» y demás de Wikisource en español: comprobado que existen; la de Protágoras figura «en desarrollo».
- Traductor «Mr. Knight» de Alcibíades II y Erixias en la edición de Jowett: identificar nombre completo y fecha de muerte (Jowett solo le llama «my friend and secretary, Mr. Knight»).
- Imagen del Codex Clarkianus: la reproducción procede de la Bodleiana vía Commons; enlazar la ficha exacta de Digital Bodleian del MS. E. D. Clarke 39 en manuscripts[].digitization_url (ahora apunta a la portada del portal). Ídem Gallica para el Parisinus graecus 1807.
- Vídeos: año exacto de los de Michael Sugrue, Wireless Philosophy, Oxford, Canal Encuentro, TED-Ed y Fundación Juan March (no consignado). Solo tres vídeos en español de canales institucionales; buscar más (RTVE, Fundación Juan March, universidades).
- Sin programas de afiliación verificados para ninguna de las editoriales registradas.
Researched on 2026-10-25