Moreover, he held that truth is not, as the Sophists thought, relative. Instead, it is objective; it is that which our reason, used rightly, apprehends. Through his systematic philosophy, he developed a formidable rejection of skepticism, the view that we lack knowledge in some fundamental way.
Believing and Knowing For Plato, there is a distinction between believing and knowing. Since there are objective truths to be known, we may believe X, but belief alone does not guarantee we are correct. There are three necessary and sufficient conditions, according to Plato, for one to have knowledge: 1 the proposition must be believed ; 2 the proposition must be true ; and 3 the proposition must be supported by good reasons , which is to say, you must be justified in believing it.
Thus, for Plato, knowledge is justified, true belief. Reason and the Forms Since truth is objective, our knowledge of true propositions must be about real things. According to Plato, these real things are Forms. Their nature is such that the only mode by which we can know them is rationality. Forms are the eternal and immutable blueprints or models for everything that is. Consequently, they are more real than their particulars. We can also extrapolate from particulars to get closer to contemplating the Forms.
This extrapolation process is made possible by the way that reason works. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the main source of Western thought.
He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, together with Socrates and Plato, laid much of the groundwork for western philosophy. Ancient Greek statesman Pericles, leader of Athens from — B.
Euripides was one of the great Athenian playwrights and poets of ancient Greece, known for the many tragedies he wrote, including 'Medea' and 'The Bacchae. Dana Plato was a child actress on the television show Diff'rent Strokes. She fell into drug addiction and died of an overdose in The Greek poet Homer is credited with being the first to write down the epic stories of 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' and the impact of his tales continues to reverberate through Western culture.
El Greco was a Greek artist whose painting and sculpture helped define the Spanish Renaissance and influence various movements to come. Arianna Huffington is a prolific author and international media mogul who started the award-winning news platform The Huffington Post. Although Hippocrates probably didn't write the famous oath that bears his name, it serves as foundation for the oath medical school graduates take at the start of their careers.
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence in Western thought. Olivia Rodrigo —. Megan Thee Stallion —. Bowen Yang —. See More. No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras often considered an early dialogue as well.
So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties. And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion , for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands.
Neither ends in failure. If we are justified in taking Socrates' speech in Plato's Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato's other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates.
So understood, Socrates was a moralist but unlike Plato not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist. That fits with Aristotle's testimony, and Plato's way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates.
The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo , Republic , Phaedrus , and Philebus.
All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual.
The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just.
When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea Sophist , Statesman ; when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws , to a visitor from Athens and he then eliminates Socrates entirely.
In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains.
This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito , which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison.
Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates. Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue negative, destructive, preparatory and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas if he had any , but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates.
It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties he was around 28 when Socrates was killed , would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later.
What would have led to such a decision? We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato's reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology.
That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro —the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is?
We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court. It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates' conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates' fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death.
The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates. But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato's mind than the content of any conversations that really took place. It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public with the exception of Apology in the form of a dialogue.
The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author?
This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases.
For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato's writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition.
Even treatise-like compositions— Timaeus and Laws , for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato's evident interest in pedagogical questions how is it possible to learn? Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato's mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other's social and political institutions.
In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato's goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers' faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions. But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras can virtue be taught?
Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says or whether he is instead speaking ironically , so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us. But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato's dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion.
There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works. We will best understand Plato's works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly.
Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing because he has done such a thing elsewhere , we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it. That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy. The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Plato's central doctrines 2. Plato's puzzles 3. Dialogue, setting, character 4.
Socrates 5. Plato's indirectness 6. Can we know Plato's mind? Socrates as the dominant speaker 8. Links between the dialogues 9. Does Plato change his mind about forms? Does Plato change his mind about politics? The historical Socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues Why dialogues? Plato's puzzles Although these propositions are often identified by Plato's readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a cut-and-dried group of propositions.
Dialogue, setting, character There is another feature of Plato's writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Socrates There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato's dialogues, being completely absent only in Laws , which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure is Socrates.
Plato's indirectness Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato's works. Socrates as the dominant speaker If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents , we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Links between the dialogues There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other.
The historical Socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs.
Bibliography The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Translations into English Cooper, John M. Contains translations of all the works handed down from antiquity with attribution to Plato, some of which are universally agreed to be spurious, with explanatory footnotes and both a general Introduction to the study of the dialogues and individual Introductory Notes to each work translated.
General Overviews Allen, Danielle, S. Benson, Hugh ed. Fine, Gail ed. Essays by many scholars on a wide range of topics, including several studies of individual dialogues. Guthrie, W. Kraut, Richard ed. Meinwald, Constance, , Plato , London: Routledge. An encyclopedia of information about the characters in all of the dialogues. It was perhaps because of this opinion that he retreated to his Academy and to Sicily for implementing his ideas.
He visited Syracuse first in , then in , and again in , with the general purpose to moderate the Sicilian tyrants with philosophical education and to establish a model political rule. But this adventure with practical politics ended in failure, and Plato went back to Athens.
His Academy, which provided a base for succeeding generations of Platonic philosophers until its final closure in C. Mathematics, rhetoric, astronomy, dialectics, and other subjects, all seen as necessary for the education of philosophers and statesmen, were studied there.
His most renowned pupil was Aristotle. Plato died in c. During his lifetime, Athens turned away from her military and imperial ambitions and became the intellectual center of Greece. Although the Republic , the Statesman , the Laws and a few shorter dialogues are considered to be the only strictly political dialogues of Plato, it can be argued that political philosophy was the area of his greatest concern. In the English-speaking world, under the influence of twentieth century analytic philosophy, the main task of political philosophy today is still often seen as conceptual analysis: the clarification of political concepts.
To understand what this means, it may be useful to think of concepts as the uses of words. Conceptual analysis then is a mental clearance, the clarification of a concept in its meaning. As such it has a long tradition and is first introduced in Platonic dialogues. However, in contrast to what it is for some analytic philosophers, for Plato conceptual analysis is not an end to itself, but a preliminary step.
The next step is critical evaluation of beliefs, deciding which one of the incompatible ideas is correct and which one is wrong. For Plato, making decisions about the right political order are, along with the choice between peace and war, the most important choices one can make in politics. Such decisions cannot be left solely to public opinion, he believes, which in many cases does not have enough foresight and gets its lessons only post factum from disasters recorded in history.
In his political philosophy, the clarification of concepts is thus a preliminary step in evaluating beliefs, and right beliefs in turn lead to an answer to the question of the best political order.
One of the most fundamental ethical and political concepts is justice. It is a complex and ambiguous concept. It may refer to individual virtue, the order of society, as well as individual rights in contrast to the claims of the general social order.
In Book I of the Republic , Socrates and his interlocutors discuss the meaning of justice. The old man of means Cephalus suggests the first definition. Yet this definition, which is based on traditional moral custom and relates justice to honesty and goodness; i. It cannot withstand the challenge of new times and the power of critical thinking.
Socrates refutes it by presenting a counterexample. If we tacitly agree that justice is related to goodness, to return a weapon that was borrowed from someone who, although once sane, has turned into a madman does not seem to be just but involves a danger of harm to both sides.
However, when Socrates finally objects that it cannot be just to harm anyone, because justice cannot produce injustice, Polemarchus is completely confused. He agrees with Socrates that justice, which both sides tacitly agree relates to goodness, cannot produce any harm, which can only be caused by injustice. Like his father, he withdraws from the dialogue.
This definition is, nevertheless, found unclear. This negative outcome can be seen as a linguistic and philosophical therapy. They are inconsistent with other opinions held to be true. These definitions have to be supplied by a definition that will assist clarity and establish the meaning of justice.
However, to propose such an adequate definition one has to know what justice really is. The way people define a given word is largely determined by the beliefs which they hold about the thing referred to by this word. A definition that is merely arbitrary or either too narrow or too broad, based on a false belief about justice, does not give the possibility of communication. Platonic dialogues are expressions of the ultimate communication that can take place between humans; and true communication is likely to take place only if individuals can share meanings of the words they use.
Communication based on false beliefs, such as statements of ideology, is still possible, but seems limited, dividing people into factions, and, as history teaches us, can finally lead only to confusion. Therefore, in the Republic , as well as in other Platonic dialogues, there is a relationship between conceptual analysis and critical evaluation of beliefs. The goals of these conversations are not merely linguistic, to arrive at an adequate verbal definition, but also substantial, to arrive at a right belief.
The focus of the second part of Book I is no longer clarification of concepts, but evaluation of beliefs. In Platonic dialogues, rather than telling them what they have to think, Socrates is often getting his interlocutors to tell him what they think.
The next stage of the discussion of the meaning of justice is taken over by Thrasymachus, a sophist, who violently and impatiently bursts into the dialogue. In the fifth and fourth century B. Plato describes the sophists as itinerant individuals, known for their rhetorical abilities, who reject religious beliefs and traditional morality, and he contrasts them with Socrates, who as a teacher would refuse to accept payment and instead of teaching skills would commit himself to a disinterested inquiry into what is true and just.
In a contemptuous manner, Thrasymachus asks Socrates to stop talking nonsense and look into the facts. The careful reader will notice that Thrasymachus identifies justice with either maintenance or observance of law. His statement is an expression of his belief that, in the world imperfect as it is, the ruling element in the city, or as we would say today the dominant political or social group, institutes laws and governs for its own benefit d.
The democrats make laws in support of democracy; the aristocrats make laws that support the government of the well-born; the propertied make laws that protect their status and keep their businesses going; and so on.
This belief implies, firstly, that justice is not a universal moral value but a notion relative to expediency of the dominant status quo group; secondly, that justice is in the exclusive interest of the dominant group; thirdly, that justice is used as a means of oppression and thus is harmful to the powerless; fourthly, that there is neither any common good nor harmony of interests between those who are in a position of power and those who are not.
All there is, is a domination by the powerful and privileged over the powerless. The moral language of justice is used merely instrumentally to conceal the interests of the dominant group and to make these interests appear universal. The arrogance with which Thrasymachus makes his statements suggests that he strongly believes that to hold a different view from his own would be to mislead oneself about the world as it is.
After presenting his statement, Thrasymachus intends to leave as if he believed that what he said was so compelling that no further debate about justice was ever possible d. In the Republic he exemplifies the power of a dogma. Indeed he presents Socrates with a powerful challenge. Yet, whether or not what he said sounds attractive to anyone, Socrates is not convinced by the statement of his beliefs.
Beliefs shape our lives as individuals, nations, ages, and civilizations. Thrasymachus withdraws, but his statement: moral skepticism and relativism, predominance of power in human relations, and non-existence of the harmony of interests, hovers over the Western mind. It takes the whole remainder of the Republic to present an argument in defense of justice as a universal value and the foundation of the best political order.
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