Plato

Like the other answer, in some ways Plato was opposed to poetry. In particular, he did not like the mimetic aspect of poety - namely that poetry imitated life. This aspect of poetry was seen as...

Plato's definition of "Man" is subject to interpretation, but one famous anecdote gives an explicit (if satirical) Platonic definition. Based on the Dialogues, animals were classified into...

Plato, one of Socrates's students, taught by writing dialogues in which teachers asked questions. In this so-called dialectic method, a teacher asks questions that help students define terms. By...

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,...

Plato's ideal government is often referred to as the kallipolis in secondary literature: this name comes from the Greek "kallos" (beautiful, noble, fine) + "polis" (city-state). His kallipolis...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This is a very good question and one that is important as it hits on a central point in Plato's philosophy. Here is some background information. The allegory of the cave is found in Plato's...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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),...

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 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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

Jung suggests that Plato was an introvert and Aristotle an extravert, although both were thinkers. Plato was more interested in his own subjective ideas and thought he could derive truths from...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

First, we should briefly mention what the allegory of the cave is. The allegory of the cave is found in Plato's Republic 514-520. In this illustration, Plato is saying that the default mode 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...

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...

In his dialog Meno, Plato puts forward—through Socrates, as always—the notion of anamnesis, or recollection. Plato believes that when we are born we already possess knowledge. This is because true...

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...

A part of Plato's Republic deals with the question of who would make the ideal ruler. In the Republic, the philosopher is the person who can see past the appearance of things and get at their...

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...

The theme of this famous allegory is that our perception of reality is limited by our point of view, in fact that any perception is a limited one. Socially, it can be extended thematically to...

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,...

To be sure, Plato isn't against literature per se. After all, he himself was a great literary stylist who, in his numerous written dialogues, made philosophy come to life in a way that few others...

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...

Callicles in this text argued for a complete lack of morality and for self-serving interest, a world in which the powerful could do what they want because justice was just a sham to be seen through...

As the subtitle suggests, Pelagia Goulimari’s first chapter centers on Plato. If you’re wondering why Goulimari starts her book on literary theory with a detailed review of Plato, it’s probably...

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 discusses justice at great length in several dialogues including Apology, Laws, Republic, and Gorgias. His views of justice are generally concerned with what is called eudaimonia, or "living...

The art you think most authoritative will not necessarily be the one you like best, and you will need to justify your answer. Arthur Schopenhauer and Walter Pater both called music the highest of...