Plato studied under which philosopher

His reasons for setting up the Academy were connected with his earlier ventures into politics. He had been bitterly disappointed with the standards displayed by those in public office and he hoped to train young men who would become statesmen.

However, having given them the values that Plato believed in, Plato thought that these men would be able to improve the political leadership of the cities of Greece. Only two further episodes in Plato's life are recorded. Plato did not expect the plan to succeed but because both Dion and Archytas of Tarentum believed in the plan then Plato agreed. Their plan was that if Dionysius II was trained in science and philosophy he would be able to prevent Carthage invading Sicily.

However, Dionysius II was jealous of Dion whom he forced out of Syracuse and the plan, as Plato had expected, fell apart.

Plato returned to Athens, but visited Syracuse again in BC hoping to be able to bring the rivals together. He remained in Syracuse for part of BC but did not achieve a political solution to the rivalry. Dion attacked Syracuse in a coup in , gained control, but was murdered in Field writes in [ 6 ] that Plato's life On the contrary, he was a man of the world, an experienced soldier, widely travelled, with close contacts with many of the leading men of affairs, both in his own city and elsewhere.

Plato's main contributions are in philosophy, mathematics and science. However, it is not as easy as one might expect to discover Plato's philosophical views.

The reason for this is that Plato wrote no systematic treatise giving his views, rather he wrote a number of dialogues about 30 which are written in the form of conversations. Firstly we should comment on what superb pieces of literature these dialogues are [ 6 ] :- They show the mastery of language, the power of indicating character, the sense of a situation, and the keen eye for both its tragic and its comic aspects, which set Plato among the greatest writers of the world.

He uses these gifts to the full in inculcating the lessons he wants to teach. In letters written by Plato he makes it clear that he understands that it will be difficult to work out his philosophical theory from the dialogues but he claims that the reader will only understand it after long thought, discussion and questioning. The dialogues do not contain Plato as a character so he does not declare that anything asserted in them are his own views.

The characters are historic with Socrates usually the protagonist so it is not clear how much these characters express views with which they themselves would have put forward. It is thought that, at least in the early dialogues, the character of Socrates expresses views that Socrates actually held. Through these dialogues, Plato contributed to the theory of art, in particular dance, music, poetry, architecture, and drama. He discussed a whole range of philosophical topics including ethics , metaphysics where topics such as immortality, man, mind, and Realism are discussed.

He discussed the philosophy of mathematics, political philosophy where topics such as censorship are discussed, and religious philosophy where topics such as atheism, dualism and pantheism are considered. In discussing epistemology he looked at ideas such as a priori knowledge and Rationalism. In his theory of Forms, Plato rejected the changeable, deceptive world that we are aware of through our senses proposing instead his world of ideas which were constant and true.

Let us illustrate Plato's theory of Forms with one of his mathematical examples. Plato considers mathematical objects as perfect forms. For example a line is an object having length but no breadth. No matter how thin we make a line in the world of our senses, it will not be this perfect mathematical form, for it will always have breadth. In the Phaedo Plato talks of objects in the real world trying to be like their perfect forms.

By this he is thinking of thinner and thinner lines which are tending in the limit to the mathematical concept of a line but, of course, never reaching it. Another example from the Phaedo is given in [ 6 ] :- The instance taken there is the mathemtical relation of equality, and the contrast is drawn between the absolute equality we think of in mathematics and the rough, approximate equality which is what we have to be content with in dealing with objects with our senses.

Again in the Republic Plato talks of geometrical diagrams as imperfect imitations of the perfect mathematical objects which they represent. Plato's contributions to the theories of education are shown by the way that he ran the Academy and his idea of what constitutes an educated person.

He also contributed to logic and legal philosophy, including rhetoric. His mother, Perictione, is said to be related to the 6th century B.

Greek statesman Solon. Some scholars believe that Plato was named for his grandfather, Aristocles, following the tradition of the naming the eldest son after the grandfather.

But there is no conclusive evidence of this, or that Plato was the eldest son in his family. Other historians claim that "Plato" was a nickname, referring to his broad physical build. This too is possible, although there is record that the name Plato was given to boys before Aristocles was born. As with many young boys of his social class, Plato was probably taught by some of Athens' finest educators. The curriculum would have featured the doctrines of Cratylus and Pythagoras as well as Parmenides.

These probably helped develop the foundation for Plato's study of metaphysics the study of nature and epistemology the study of knowledge. Plato's father died when he was young, and his mother remarried her uncle, Pyrilampes, a Greek politician and ambassador to Persia. Plato is believed to have had two full brothers, one sister and a half brother, though it is not certain where he falls in the birth order. Often, members of Plato's family appeared in his dialogues.

Historians believe this is an indication of Plato's pride in his family lineage. As a young man, Plato experienced two major events that set his course in life. One was meeting the great Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates's methods of dialogue and debate impressed Plato so much that he soon he became a close associate and dedicated his life to the question of virtue and the formation of a noble character. The other significant event was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in which Plato served for a brief time between and B.

The defeat of Athens ended its democracy, which the Spartans replaced with an oligarchy. Two of Plato's relatives, Charmides and Critias, were prominent figures in the new government, part of the notorious Thirty Tyrants whose brief rule severely reduced the rights of Athenian citizens.

After the oligarchy was overthrown and democracy was restored, Plato briefly considered a career in politics, but the execution of Socrates in B. After Socrates's death, Plato traveled for 12 years throughout the Mediterranean region, studying mathematics with the Pythagoreans in Italy, and geometry, geology, astronomy and religion in Egypt.

During this time, or soon after, he began his extensive writing. There is some debate among scholars on the order of these writings, but most believe they fall into three distinct periods. The first, or early, period occurs during Plato's travels B.

The Apology of Socrates seems to have been written shortly after Socrates's death. 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 Plato occasionally mentions Egypt in his works, but not in ways that reveal much of any consequence see, for examples, Phaedrus cb; Philebus 19b. Better evidence may be found for his visits to Italy and Sicily, especially in the Seventh Letter.

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 Diod. Dion 5; D. In any event, Plato returned to Athens and founded a school, known as the Academy. Although the philosopher now in his sixties was not entirely persuaded of this possibility Seventh Letter b-c , he agreed to go.

This trip, like the last one, however, did not go well at all. Dion Dion and Plato stayed in Athens for the next four years c. 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 a-b, Seventh Letter b-c , but Plato refused the invitation, much to the consternation of both Syracusans Third Letter a, Seventh Letter c.

Dionysius once again effectively imprisoned Plato in Syracuse, and the latter was only able to escape again with help from his Tarentine friends Seventh Letter a-b. 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 D. His grave, however, has not yet been discovered by archeological investigations. Parmenides and Zeno also appear as characters in his dialogue, the Parmenides. Diogenes Laertius also notes other important influences:. He mixed together in his works the arguments of Heracleitus, the Pythagoreans, and Socrates. Regarding the sensibles, he borrows from Heraclitus; regarding the intelligibles, from Pythagoras; and regarding politics, from Socrates.

A little later, Diogenes makes a series of comparisons intended to show how much Plato owed to the comic poet, Epicharmus 3. Diogenes Laertius 3. In the Seventh Letter, we learn that Plato was a friend of Archytas of Tarentum, a well-known Pythagorean statesman and thinker see d-e , and in the Phaedo, Plato has Echecrates, another Pythagorean, in the group around Socrates on his final day in prison.

Nonetheless, it is plain that no influence on Plato was greater than that of Socrates. According to Diogenes Laertius, the respect was mutual 3. Supposedly possessed of outstanding intellectual and artistic ability even from his youth, according to Diogenes, Plato began his career as a writer of tragedies, but hearing Socrates talk, he wholly abandoned that path, and even burned a tragedy he had hoped to enter in a dramatic competition D.

He may, indeed, have written some epigrams; of the surviving epigrams attributed to him in antiquity, some may be genuine. Plato was not the only writer of dialogues in which Socrates appears as a principal character and speaker. A recent study of these, by Charles H. Kahn , , concludes that the very existence of the genre—and all of the conflicting images of Socrates we find given by the various authors—shows that we cannot trust as historically reliable any of the accounts of Socrates given in antiquity, including those given by Plato.

But it is one thing to claim that Plato was not the only one to write Socratic dialogues, and quite another to hold that Plato was only following the rules of some genre of writings in his own work. Such a claim, at any rate, is hardly established simply by the existence of these other writers and their writings.

The question has led to a number of seemingly irresolvable scholarly disputes. One way to approach this issue has been to find some way to arrange the dialogues into at least relative dates. It has frequently been assumed that if we can establish a relative chronology for when Plato wrote each of the dialogues, we can provide some objective test for the claim that Plato represented Socrates more accurately in the earlier dialogues, and less accurately in the later dialogues.

The uncontroversial internal and external historical evidence for a chronological ordering is relatively slight. Aristotle Politics 2. Internal references in the Sophist a and the Statesman also known as the Politicus; a, b show the Statesman to come after the Sophist. The Timaeus 17bb may refer to Republic as coming before it, and more clearly mentions the Critias as following it 27a. Similarly, internal references in the Sophist a, c and the Theaetetus e may be thought to show the intended order of three dialogues: Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Sophist.

Even so, it does not follow that these dialogues were actually written in that order. At Theaetetus c, Plato announces through his characters that he will abandon the somewhat cumbersome dialogue form that is employed in his other writings. Since the form does not appear in a number of other writings, it is reasonable to infer that those in which it does not appear were written after the Theaetetus.

Scholars have sought to augment this fairly scant evidence by employing different methods of ordering the remaining dialogues. Originally done by laborious study by individuals, stylometry can now be done more efficiently with assistance by computers. Neither of these general approaches has commanded unanimous assent among scholars, and it is unlikely that debates about this topic can ever be put entirely to rest.

We have more to say on this subject in the next section. Our own view of the probable dates and groups of dialogues, which to some extent combine the results of stylometry and content analysis, is as follows all lists but the last in alphabetical order :. Early-Transitional Either at the end of the early group or at the beginning of the middle group, c.

Late-Transitional Either at the end of the middle group, or the beginning of the late group, c. Late c. In Henri Estienne whose Latinized name was Stephanus published an edition of the dialogues in which each page of the text is separated into five sections labeled a, b, c, d, and e.

The standard style of citation for Platonic texts includes the name of the text, followed by Stephanus page and section numbers e. Republic d. Scholars sometimes also add numbers after the Stephanus section letters, which refer to line numbers within the Stephanus sections in the standard Greek edition of the dialogues, the Oxford Classical texts. Several other works, including thirteen letters and eighteen epigrams, have been attributed to Plato.

These other works are generally called the spuria and the dubia. The spuria were collected among the works of Plato but suspected as frauds even in antiquity.

The dubia are those presumed authentic in later antiquity, but which have more recently been doubted. Ten of the spuria are mentioned by Diogenes Laertius at 3.

Works whose authenticity was also doubted in antiquity include the Second Alcibiades or Alcibiades II , Epinomis, Hipparchus, and Rival Lovers also known as either Rivals or Lovers , and these are sometimes defended as authentic today.

If any are of these are authentic, the Epinomis would be in the late group, and the others would go with the early or early transitional groups. Seventeen or eighteen epigrams poems appropriate to funerary monuments or other dedications are also attributed to Plato by various ancient authors. Most of these are almost certainly not by Plato, but some few may be authentic. None appear to provide anything of great philosophical interest. The dubia include the First Alcibiades or Alcibiades I , Minos, and Theages, all of which, if authentic, would probably go with the early or early transitional groups, the Cleitophon, which might be early, early transitional, or middle, and the letters, of which the Seventh seems the best candidate for authenticity.