Plato
the best philosophers. Plato was the
student of Socrates . Plato was the teacher of Aristotle, and Plato wrote in the
middle of the fourth century. Though influenced primarily by Socrates, to the
extent that Socrates is usually the main character in many of Plato's writings,
Plato was also influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans.
There
are varying degrees of controversy over which of Plato's works are authentic,
and in what order they were written, due to their antiquity and the manner of
their preservation through time. Nonetheless, his earliest works are generally
regarded as the most reliable of the ancient sources on Socrates, and the
character Socrates that we know through these writings is considered to be one
of the greatest of the ancient philosophers.
Plato's
middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are
generally regarded as providing Plato's own philosophy, where the main
character in effect speaks for Plato himself. These works blend ethics,
political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an
interconnected and systematic philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we
get the theory of Forms, according to which the world we know through the
senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and unchanging world of the
Forms. Plato's works also contain the origins of the familiar complaint that
the arts work by inflaming the passions, and are mere illusions. We also are
introduced to the ideal of "Platonic love:" Plato saw love as
motivated by a longing for the highest Form of beauty—The Beautiful Itself, and
love as the motivational power through which the highest of achievements are
possible. Because they tended to distract us into accepting less than our
highest potentials, however, Plato mistrusted and generally advised against
physical expressions of love.
It
is widely accepted that Plato, the Athenian philosopher, was born in 428-7
B.C.E and died at the age of eighty or eighty-one at 348-7 B.C.E. These dates,
however, are not entirely certain, for according to Diogenes Laertius (D.L.),
following Apollodorus' chronology, Plato was born the year Pericles died, was
six years younger than Isocrates, and died at the age of eighty-four (D.L.
3.2-3.3). If Plato's date of death is correct in Apollodorus' version, Plato
would have been born in 430 or 431. Diogenes' claim that Plato was born the
year Pericles died would put his birth in 429. Later (at 3.6), Diogenes says
that Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates was put to death (in 399), which
would, again, put his year of birth at 427. In spite of the confusion, the
dates of Plato's life we gave above, which are based upon Eratosthenes'
calculations, have traditionally been accepted as accurate.When Socrates died,
Plato left Athens, staying first in Megara, but then going on to several other
places, including perhaps Cyrene, Italy, Sicily, and even Egypt. Strabo (17.29)
claims that he was shown where Plato lived when he visited Heliopolis in Egypt.
Plato occasionally mentions Egypt in his works, but not in ways that reveal
much of any consequence (see, for examples, Phaedrus 274c-275b; Philebus 19b).
Better
evidence may be found for his visits to Italy and Sicily, especially in the
Seventh Letter. According to the account given there, Plato first went to Italy
and Sicily when he was "about forty”. While he stayed in Syracuse, he
became the instructor to Dion, brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius I.
According to doubtful stories from later antiquity, Dionysius became annoyed
with Plato at some point during this visit, and arranged to have the
philosopher sold into slavery In any event, Plato returned to Athens and
founded a school, known as the Academy. (This is where we get our word,
"academic." The Academy got its name from its location, a grove of
trees sacred to the hero Academus—or Hecademus a mile or so outside the
Athenian walls; the site can still be visited in modern Athens, but visitors
will find it depressingly void of interesting monuments or features.) Except
for two more trips to Sicily, the Academy seems to have been Plato's home base
for the remainder of his life.
The
first of Plato's remaining two Sicilian adventures came after Dionysius I died
and his young son, Dionysius II, ascended to the throne. His
uncle/brother-in-law Dion persuaded the young tyrant to invite Plato to come to
help him become a philosopher-ruler of the sort described in the Republic.
Although the philosopher (now in his sixties) was not entirely persuaded of
this possibility (Seventh Letter 328b-c), he agreed to go. This trip, like the
last one, however, did not go well at all. Within months, the younger Dionysius
had Dion sent into exile for sedition, and Plato became effectively under house
arrest as the "personal guest" of the dictator .
Plato
eventually managed to gain the tyrant's permission to return to Athens (Seventh
Letter 338a), and he and Dion were reunited at the Academy .Dionysius agreed
that "after the war" (Seventh Letter 338a; perhaps the Lucanian War
in ,he would invite Plato and Dion back to Syracuse (Third Letter 316e-317a,
Seventh Letter 338a-b). Dion and Plato stayed in Athens for the next four years
Dionysius then summoned Plato, but wished for Dion to wait a while longer. Dion
accepted the condition and encouraged Plato to go immediately anyway (Third
Letter 317a-b, Seventh Letter 338b-c), but Plato refused the invitation, much
to the consternation of both Syracusans on board begging Plato to return to
Syracuse. Partly because of his friend Dion's enthusiasm for the plan, Plato
departed one more time to Syracuse. Once again, however, things in Syracuse
were not at all to Plato's liking. Dionysius once again effectively imprisoned
Plato in Syracuse, and the latter was only able to escape again with help from
his Tarentine friends.
Dion
subsequently gathered an army of mercenaries and invaded his own homeland. But
his success was short-lived: he was assassinated and Sicily was reduced to
chaos. Plato, perhaps now completely disgusted with politics, returned to his
beloved Academy, where he lived out the last thirteen years of his life.
According to Diogenes, Plato was buried at the school he founded. His grave,
however, has not yet been discovered by archeological investigations.
source : iep.utm.edu
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