Footnotes to Plato

Following Father's Day, KnowledgeNews is taking a 5-day trip to ancient Greece, to meet philosophical forebears whose ideas helped to define western culture. Yesterday, we drew a picture of Socrates. Today, we turn to his pupil, Plato.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition," said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." The great Greek is that important.

His work stands at the center of classical Greek philosophy. Socrates was Plato's teacher, but Socrates never wrote anything down. In fact, much of what we know about Socrates, we learned from Plato. Aristotle was Plato's student, and partly defined his work through contrast with Plato's--thereby beginning Whitehead's "series of footnotes."

Living Large

Plato was born in 428 or 427 BC, the scion of a prominent Athenian family. His given name was Aristocles. Plato was a nickname meaning "broad" (presumably in reference to his build). At the time, Athens was a free-wheeling democracy, and young Plato seemed destined for politics.

But philosophy intervened, and he became an avid follower of Socrates instead, joining the "gadfly" who wandered around Athens trying to get people to examine their ideas more closely. It hit him hard when Socrates was executed in 399 on charges of impiety and corrupting the city's youth. By his own account, Plato was in the audience when Socrates defended himself against these charges--a rhetorical performance Plato later reproduced in his famous "Apology."

He Said, He Said

After Socrates' death, Plato traveled in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. This was probably when he began writing. Plato's most famous works are dialogues--quasi-fictional accounts of conversations in which real people like Protagoras debate philosophical questions with Socrates. Scholars argue endlessly over which ideas in the dialogues are actually Plato's and which belonged to Socrates. But the general consensus is that Plato's early works are largely a record of what he remembered from his master's teachings.

By 387, Plato had returned to Athens. He bought land and founded a school, which came to be known as the Academy. The Academy featured courses on astronomy, biology, rhetoric, mathematics, philosophy, and political theory. Many prominent intellectuals studied there, including Aristotle, and the school outlived Plato by nearly 900 years.

Returning to Politics

In his later writings, Plato began advancing ideas of his own. His most widely read work is the "Republic," a book-length dialogue on the nature of justice. Basically, Plato argues that a just man is one in whom every component of personality harmoniously plays its proper role, with reason paramount. He goes on to argue that a just society would be one in which every segment of the population played its proper role, with a rational "philosopher king" paramount.

Toward the end of his life, Plato tried to put his political ideas into practice. First, he traveled to Sicily to tutor the state's young ruler, Dionysius II. Then, when Dionysius didn't become a philosopher king, he returned to Athens and began his last major work, the "Laws." In it, Plato tried to sketch a political blueprint that could actually be implemented. He was probably still working on it when he died in 347 BC.