Plato

This is a great question. Plato has written a lot on the topic literature and so many thing can be stated. So, I will have to be selective. Here are two points. First, Plato believed that...

Plato's allegory of the cave continues to be relevant. Many people today are voicing their opinions regarding society's need to leave the metaphorical darkness, or cave, of ignorance in order to...

Plato, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, was born in Athens around 428 or 427 BC. It was a time of war and political upheaval, and that turmoil affected Plato's childhood and youth and...

PLato's main contributions to metaphysics were mind-body dualism, the theory of forms, and the notion of a hierarchy of being. In his early dialogues, the characters search for the essences...

Ethos, pathos, and logos are all examples of rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. All three are ably deployed by Plato in his reconstruction of Socrates's defense speech in Apology. First,...

Crito gives four main reasons for his desire to help Socrates to escape. First, Crito states that it would reflect badly on Socrates' friends, as if they did nothing to help him. Second, Crito says...

Plato draws a series of oppositions between knowledge and opinion. The central opposition is ontological. Knowledge, because it is unchanging and certain, must be of things which are rather than...

For Plato, ideas like Beauty, Courage, Love, Justice, and all other metaphysical concepts only have any real basis in capital "T" Truth whenever they are contemplated outside of the senses. As he...

Western thought is indebted to Plato in many ways. It is known for certain that early Christian thinkers, like Augustine or Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, read and commented on Plato. Augustine...

Plato's concept of philosophy centers on questioning and interrogation. One of the main tenets of his philosophy is its ability to withstand withering scrutiny. As Socrates says in Apologia, "I...

In his dialogue entitled Philebus, Plato discusses the merits of a life devoted to study and contemplation versus a life devoted to seeking physical pleasure, or "hedonism." In contrasting the two,...

Plato's view of mimesis is essentially that it is seductive yet meretricious and dangerous. In Ion, Socrates (whose views appear to be identical to those of the author) discusses poetry with the...

Plato's theory of forms says that everything on earth is an imperfect imitation of an ideal object. That ideal objects that we imitate exist outside of time and space in a perfect realm. Perhaps...

While I find many of Plato's points in his educational dialogue fascinating, I think that his construction of educational philosophy is not able to translate very well into the modern setting. The...

I suppose you could call it a metaphor when Socrates claims that Ion’s gift of speaking about Homer is not an art but an inspiration. He goes on to compare this idea of inspiration to a “divinity...

Aristophanes was the most famous comic poet of ancient Greece and author of The Clouds, a play about Socrates that is actually mentioned in Plato's Apology as having been brought forward as...

America has managed to make a system where two parties represent the diverse and often conflicting views of the millions of citizens. This inevitably leads to two candidates who are just close...

In response to the argument of Callicles that any notion of justice is man-made and therefore false as it is an artificial law and not a natural one, Socrates, the voice of Plato in this text,...

The first thing to consider is that we do not know what Socrates as an historical figure thought about the issue, only what the Socrates character in various Platonic dialogues said as he took part...

In the Crito, one of Socrates' friends visit him in prison and beg him to escape since he has been sentenced to die. The dramatic setting of the Crito is a short while after the events of Plato's...

In The Republic, Plato outlines his views of what makes good governance. Plato saw problems that could arise with monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies. Out of the three, Plato was the most...

Plato doesn't think that all literature is trivial, false, and useless. He has no objection to morally uplifting poems that teach the citizens of his ideal republic how to behave themselves. And...

Well...this is a very general question. But I think one way to answer this question is that he was a rationalist. This means that he believed that ideas were very real, more real that objects...

Plato makes some pretty profound statements about man. In one of his late Dialogues named Statesman, he uses the voice of the Stranger to make an astonishing claim: that man is essentially a...

A discussion of the theories of society of Plato and Aristotle actually has two components, analysis of how they thought real societies actually operated and how they thought an ideal society...

Plato deals with the question of the relationship of poetry to reality in two major dialogues, Ion and Republic. In Ion, the Socratic character criticizes the rhapsode Ion for claiming to know...

Plato discusses justice throughout his dialogues, expressing his ideas (or those of Socrates) in various different ways. His most sustained treatment of the subject is in the Republic, where...

Plato notes that the soul has three functions: it is used for desire (of material things perceived by the senses), emotion (used for social interaction), and reason (which is aimed at seeking...

Plato believed that teaching people virtue was most important. All of the Greek philosophers believed that poetry "imitate the order and harmony of nature." They also thought that the aims of...

Plato certainly worried about governments censoring intellectuals. This he discusses in The Apology (or just Apology) in which he defends Socrates who had been charged with corrupting the youth of...

One of the most respected philosophers in history, and a noteworthy figure of his time in ancient Greece, Plato's writings continue to be studied thousands of years after his death. His...

In education, Plato put more importance on math and philosophy (and abstract ideas - Forms) than on art, poetry, and music. He believed that math and ideas were much closer to the truth while the...

Diotima gives Socrates a genealogy of love, stating that he is the son of "resource and need." In her view, love is not delicate, but beggarly and harsh. He sleeps in doorways, and is a master of...

Plato divides the soul into the appetites, the spirited part, and the mind. The appetites represent our desires, physical needs, and comforts, while the spirited parts represent the pieces of us...

In the dialogue Parmenides, Plato critiques his own theory of forms in the following manner. Suppose we have a form such as largeness (the instance suggested by Parmenides in the dialogue) or...

I am not so sure that we should agree with Plato. As you probably know Plato is pretty harsh when it comes to poets. Let me give you Plato's rationale and then answer why we should agree or...

In short, Crito appeals to Socrates based on friendship, philosophy, and family to consider escaping from prison. Crito fails. In my opinion, Crito was very unpersuasive for two reasons. First,...

A dialogue between Socrates and anyone involved Socrates asking lots of questions as he forced his partner in conversation to clarify his/her thinking, explain exactly what he thought, and explore...

Plato's Phaedo protrays the actual death of Socrates. It is a conversation Socrates has with his followers. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates drinks the poison hemlock. During the course...

Plato's views on government can be found in the Republic as well as the Laws; however, it is only in the Republic that he considers a range of different regimes. In book IV, he tells us that the...

According to Plato, knowledge isn't learned, it is simply recalled. Because Plato believes in reincarnation, he does not believe that souls must gain knowledge after their birth, but rather that...

Plato favored a doctrine relating to the immortality of the "soul" and he developed an idea called "the theory of Forms." Taking the form of written dialogues, he presented accounts relating to...

Plato's fundamental belief is that all endeavors must strive to reveal the essence of "the form" or ideal of truth. To that end, poetry's construction of illusion or a version of truth that does...

Socrates was Plato's teacher and became the central philosophical figure in many of Plato's writings. Socrates wrote nothing himself, so most of what we know of him comes from Plato's writing....

In many religious and philosophical traditions, the soul is considered to have some form of existence independent of the body. While in some religious systems (Christianity and Islam, for example),...

The Platonic dialogues are the writings in which Plato lays out his philosophy. They are called dialogues because they are written as a series of conversations as opposed to simple treatises on...