biography of plato

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 16, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The Athenian philosopher Plato (c. 428-347 B.C.) is one of the most important figures of the Ancient Greek world and the entire history of Western thought. In his written dialogues he conveyed and expanded on the ideas and techniques of his teacher Socrates.

The Academy he founded was by some accounts the world’s first university and in it he trained his greatest student, the equally influential philosopher Aristotle. Plato’s recurring fascination was the distinction between ideal forms and everyday experience, and how it played out both for individuals and for societies. In the “Republic,” his most famous work, he envisioned a civilization governed not by lowly appetites but by the pure wisdom of a philosopher-king.

Plato: Early Life and Education

Plato was born around 428 B.C., during the final years of the Golden Age of Pericles’ Athens. He was of noble Athenian lineage on both sides. His father Ariston died when Plato was a child. His mother Perictione remarried the politician Pyrilampes. Plato grew up during the Peloponnesian War (431-404) and came of age around the time of Athens’ final defeat by Sparta and the political chaos that followed. He was educated in philosophy, poetry and gymnastics by distinguished Athenian teachers including the philosopher Cratylus.

Plato's Influences

The young Plato became a devoted follower of Socrates—indeed, he was one of the youths Socrates was condemned for allegedly corrupting. Plato’s recollections of Socrates’ lived-out philosophy and style of relentless questioning, the Socratic method, became the basis for his early dialogues. Plato’s dialogues, along with “Apologia,” his written account of the trial of Socrates, are viewed by historians as the most accurate available picture of the elder philosopher, who left no written works of his own.

Following Socrates’ forced suicide, Plato spent 12 years traveling in southern Italy, Sicily and Egypt, studying with other philosophers including followers of the mystic mathematician Pythagoras including Theodorus of Cyrene (creator of the spiral of Theodorus or Pythagorean spiral), Archytas of Tarentum and Echecrates of Phlius. Plato’s time among the Pythagoreans piqued his interest in mathematics.

Plato’s Theory of Forms, stating that the physical world we know is but a shadow of the real one, was strongly influenced by Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. The two appear as characters in Plato’s dialogue “The Parmenides.”

Plato had a lifelong relationship with the ruling family of Syracuse, who would later seek his advice on reforming their city’s politics.

Platonic Academy

Around 387, the 40-year-old Plato returned to Athens and founded his philosophical school in the grove of the Greek hero Academus, just outside the city walls. In his open-air Academy he delivered lectures to students gathered from throughout the Greek world (nine-tenths of them from outside Athens). 

Did you know? The section on music in Plato's "Republic" suggests that in an ideal society flutes would be banned in favor of the more dignified lyre, but on his deathbed Plato reportedly summoned a young girl to play her flute for him, tapping out the rhythm with his finger while he breathed his last.

Many of Plato’s writings, especially the so-called later dialogues, seem to have originated in his teaching there. In establishing the Academy Plato moved beyond the precepts of Socrates, who never founded a school and questioned the very idea of a teacher’s ability to impart knowledge.

Aristotle arrived from northern Greece to join the Academy at age 17, studying and teaching there for the last 20 years of Plato’s life. Plato died in Athens, and was probably buried on the Academy grounds.

Plato's Dialogues

With the exception of a set of letters of dubious provenance, all of Plato’s surviving writings are in dialogue form, with the character of Socrates appearing in all but one of them. His 36 dialogues are generally ordered into early, middle and late, though their chronology is determined by style and content rather than specific dates. 

The earliest of Plato’s dialogues offer a deep exploration of Socrates’ dialectic method of breaking down and analyzing ideas and presumptions. In the “Euthpyro,” Socrates’ endless questioning pushes a religious expert to realize that he has no understanding of what “piety” means. Such analyses pushed his students towards grappling with so-called Platonic forms—the ineffable perfect models (truth, beauty, what a chair should look like) by which people judge objects and experiences. 

In the middle dialogues, Plato’s individual ideas and beliefs, though never advocated outright, emerge from the Socratic form. The “Symposium” is a series of drinking-party speeches on the nature of love, in which Socrates says the best thing to do with romantic desire is to convert it into amicable truth-seeking (an idea termed “Platonic love” by later writers). In the “Meno,” Socrates demonstrates that wisdom is less a matter of learning things than “recollecting” what the soul already knows, in the way that an untaught boy can be led to discover for himself a geometric proof. 

The monumental “Republic” is a parallel exploration of the soul of a nation and of an individual. In both, Plato finds a three-part hierarchy between rulers, auxiliaries and citizens and between reason, emotion and desire. Just as reason should reign supreme in the individual, so should a wise ruler control a society. 

Only those with wisdom (ideally a sort of “philosopher-king”) are able to discern the true nature of things. The experiences of the lower tiers of the state and of the soul are—as Plato’s famous analogy has it—related to true knowledge the way the shadows on the wall of a cave are related to, yet wholly different from, the forms that cast them. 

Plato’s late dialogues are barely dialogues at all but rather explorations of specific topics. The “Timeaus” explains a cosmology intertwined with geometry, in which perfected three-dimensional shapes—cubes, pyramids, icosahedrons—are the “Platonic solids” out of which the whole universe is made. In the “Laws,” his final dialogue, Plato retreats from the pure theory of the “Republic,” suggesting that experience and history as well as wisdom can inform the running of an ideal state. 

Plato Quotes 

Plato is credited with coining several phrases that are still popular today. Here are some of Plato’s most famous quotes: 

· “Love is a serious mental disease.” 

· “When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.” 

 · “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge.” 

 · “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” 

· “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.” 

· “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” 

· “Man-a being in search of meaning.” 

· “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of lover, everyone becomes a poet.” 

· “There are two things a person should never be angry at: What they can help, and what they cannot.” 

· “People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.” 

Plato: Legacy and Influence 

The Academy flourished for nearly three centuries following Plato’s death, but was destroyed in the sacking of Athens by the Roman general Sulla in 86 B.C. Though continually read in the  Byzantine Empire  and in the Islamic world, Plato was overshadowed by Aristotle in the Christian west. 

It was only in the Renaissance that scholars like Petrarch led a revival of Plato’s thought, in particular his explorations of logic and geometry. William Wordsworth, Percy Shelly and others in the 19th-century Romantic movement found philosophical solace in Plato’s dialogues.

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Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence in Western thought.

Who Was Plato?

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato was a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle. His writings explored justice, beauty and equality, and also contained discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology and the philosophy of language. Plato founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the Western world.

Due to a lack of primary sources from the time period, much of Plato's life has been constructed by scholars through his writings and the writings of contemporaries and classical historians. Traditional history estimates Plato's birth was around 428 B.C.E., but more modern scholars, tracing later events in his life, believe he was born between 424 and 423 B.C.E. Both of his parents came from the Greek aristocracy. Plato's father, Ariston, descended from the kings of Athens and Messenia. His mother, Perictione, is said to be related to the 6th century B.C.E. 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 409 and 404 B.C.E. 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 399 B.C.E. soured him on this idea and he turned to a life of study and philosophy.

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.

Early, Middle and Late Periods: An Overview

The first, or early, period occurs during Plato's travels (399-387 B.C.E.). The Apology of Socrates seems to have been written shortly after Socrates's death. Other texts in this time period include Protagoras , Euthyphro , Hippias Major and Minor and Ion . In these dialogues, Plato attempts to convey Socrates's philosophy and teachings.

In the second, or middle, period, Plato writes in his own voice on the central ideals of justice, courage, wisdom and moderation of the individual and society. The Republic was written during this time with its exploration of just government ruled by philosopher kings.

In the third, or late, period, Socrates is relegated to a minor role and Plato takes a closer look at his own early metaphysical ideas. He explores the role of art, including dance, music, drama and architecture, as well as ethics and morality. In his writings on the Theory of Forms, Plato suggests that the world of ideas is the only constant and that the perceived world through our senses is deceptive and changeable.

Founding the Academy

Sometime around 385 B.C.E., Plato founded a school of learning, known as the Academy, which he presided over until his death. It is believed the school was located at an enclosed park named for a legendary Athenian hero. The Academy operated until 529 C.E.., when it was closed by Roman Emperor Justinian I, who feared it was a source of paganism and a threat to Christianity. Over its years of operation, the Academy's curriculum included astronomy, biology, mathematics, political theory and philosophy. Plato hoped the Academy would provide a place for future leaders to discover how to build a better government in the Greek city-states.

In 367 B.C.E., Plato was invited by Dion, a friend and disciple, to be the personal tutor of his nephew, Dionysius II, the new ruler of Syracuse (Sicily). Dion believed that Dionysius showed promise as an ideal leader. Plato accepted, hoping the experience would produce a philosopher king. But Dionysius fell far short of expectations and suspected Dion, and later Plato, of conspiring against him. He had Dion exiled and Plato placed under "house arrest." Eventually, Plato returned to Athens and his Academy. One of his more promising students there was Aristotle, who would take his mentor's teachings in new directions.

Final Years and Death

Plato's final years were spent at the Academy and with his writing. The circumstances surrounding his death are clouded, though it is fairly certain that he died in Athens around 348 B.C.E., when he was in his early 80s. Some scholars suggest that he died while attending a wedding, while others believe he died peacefully in his sleep.

Plato's impact on philosophy and the nature of humans has had a lasting impact far beyond his homeland of Greece. His work covered a broad spectrum of interests and ideas: mathematics, science and nature, morals and political theory. His beliefs on the importance of mathematics in education have proven to be essential for understanding the entire universe. His work on the use of reason to develop a more fair and just society that is focused on the equality of individuals established the foundation for modern democracy.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 428
• Birth City: Athens
• Birth Country: Greece
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Ancient Greek philosopher Plato founded the Academy and is the author of philosophical works of unparalleled influence in Western thought.
• Education and Academia
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• Death Year: 348
• Death City: Athens
• Death Country: Greece
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GREAT THINKERS Plato

Plato is one of the most brilliant and far-reaching writers to have ever lived. Our very conception of philosophy—of rigorous thinking concerning the true situation of man, the nature of the whole, and the perplexity of being—owes a great debt to his work. No area of inquiry seems foreign to him: his writings investigate ethics, politics, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, aesthetics, and epistemology in tremendous depth and breadth. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

There are few contemporary sources for the life of Plato. According to Diogenes Laertius, who lived many centuries later than the philosophers about whom he was writing, Plato was born to Ariston, an Athenian aristocrat who traced his lineage to Codrus, the king of Athens, and to Melanthus, the king of Messina. The family of his mother, Perictione, boasted a relationship with the great Athenian legislator Solon. Diogenes Laertius also reports that the philosopher’s name was Aristocles, for his grandfather, but that his wrestling coach dubbed him “Platon,” meaning “broad,” either on account of his robust physique, or the width of his forehead, or eloquence of his speech. And yet modern scholars are in doubt, since the name “Plato” was not uncommon in the Athens of Plato’s day.

Well before his encounter with Socrates, Plato was known to accompany philosophers such as Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus. Later in life, after the death of Socrates, Plato traveled around Egypt, Italy, Sicily, and Cyrene, Libya. Upon his return to Athens at around 40 years of age, Plato founded the first known institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, named for its location in the Grove of Academus. The Academy was open until its destruction by Sulla in 84 BCE. It counts among its illustrious alumni many fine minds, but none more renowned than Aristotle .

After founding the Academy, Plato became involved in the politics of Syracuse. According to Diogenes, Plato visited Syracuse while it was under the rule of Dionysius. While there, Dionysius’ brother-in-law, Dion, became Plato’s disciple. Dion, however, later turned against Plato, selling him into slavery. During this time, Plato nearly faced death in Cyrene. Fortunately, chancing upon an admirer who purchased his freedom, Plato was spared and found his way home.

Upon the death of Dionysius, according to Plato’s account in his Seventh Letter , Dion requested that Plato return to Syracuse to tutor young Dionysius II. In another reversal of fortune, Dionysius II expelled his uncle Dion, and compelled Plato to remain. Plato would eventually leave Syracuse, while Dion later returned to Syracuse and overthrew Dionysius II, only to be usurped by Callipus, another disciple of Plato.

Ancient sources offer differing accounts of Plato’s death. According to one source, Plato died peacefully in his bed listening to the sweet sounds of a Thracian flute girl. Another source reports that he died while attending a friend’s wedding feast. Still another account simply says he died in his sleep.

For further biographical reading, see also:

The Cambridge Companion to Plato , ed. Richard Kraut, Cambridge: 1992.

Biography Online

Plato Biography

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Alfred North Whitehead

Early life of Plato

The early life of Plato is only partially recorded, but he was born in 428/427 BCE to an aristocratic family in Athens. His father’s side claimed descent from the god Poseidon and the last kings of Athens. Some sources suggest that his real name was Aristocles, and that ‘Plato’ was a nickname given to him later in life. Plato roughly translates as the ‘broad’ It may have been a reflection of the breadth of interests that Plato considered.

He was given a good education, and he soon impressed those around him with his speed of learning and clarity of thought. He was also drawn to the philosopher Socrates . Socrates was a great and independent thinker who gathered a group of young men to talk and discuss philosophy. Plato was deeply impressed by the personality, spirit and philosophic detachment of his mentor Socrates. As Plato writes:

“Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside.  Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within.  May I consider the wise man rich.  As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.”

– Plato, “Phaedrus” – a prayer of Socrates, as portrayed in the dialogue.

Plato was deeply hurt after Socrates’ trial in 399 BC where he was condemned for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’ and sentenced to death – being forced to drink hemlock. After the death of Socrates, Plato left Athens, disgusted with the mob-mentality of Athenian democracy. He travelled widely around the Meditteranean region, visiting Greece, Italy and Egypt. He came into contact with followers of Pythagoras and he was influenced by some of their philosophic ideas.

Relationship with Socrates

Socrates appears in most of Plato’s writings, and it is clear that Socrates and his Socratic dialogues had a big influence on Plato’s own writing and style of teaching.

It is only through Plato, that we get a clear idea of Socrates’ philosophy and way of life. In ‘ Apology of Socrates ‘ , Plato writes an account of Socrates defending himself in a trial which ultimately led to his own death. It presents Socrates as a model philosopher, calmly putting the ideals of justice above any personal desire.

“It would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”

Plato (Words spoken by Socrates,) “The Gorgias”

However, Plato was not merely transcribing the words of Socrates; he was also using his own interpretations and ideas to those which he learned from him.

Plato Academy

The School of Athens by Raffael. Plato and Aristotle are depicted together

In the 380s, Plato returned to Athens where he founded “The Academy” a school of learning, philosophy and research. It was a pioneer of future universities and became a magnet for the leading minds of the time. The polymath Aristotle spent 20 years at Plato’s Academy and further heightened its reputation. It was at the Academy that Plato wrote his great works and taught a range of students.

Plato’s Central Doctrines

Plato in the Academy picture

Plato wrote on a whole range of topics, but it is his ethics and general philosophy which seemed to be his biggest interest. Plato was fundamentally a rationalist who felt the role of philosophy was to help people to live a good life. He sought to make sense of the world through reason and empiricism and he used this basic approach to a range of different topics. On metaphysics, he saw a distinction between the body (corporeal world) and the soul. To Plato, the soul could become captive to the material desires of the body, and to gain lasting happiness, the higher-wisdom of the soul and mind should be in control of a man’s lower passions.

“The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures.” – Plato, “The Republic”

Plato also saw a distinction between the imperfection of the material world and the highest ideals which transcend material imperfections. Plato felt that someone of a ‘philosophic mind’ could differentiate between outward limitations and the highest ideals of beauty, truth, unity and justice. It is a philosophy which hints at the limitations of the material and the mental world and encourages an aspiration to higher ideals.

“I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed … from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.” – Plato, “The Symposium”

He also mentions that the life we live is based on previous choices in either this incarnation or previous incarnations. Plato’s philosophy was also heavily influenced by Pythagoras , especially his religious views on transmigration.

In Politics , Plato developed the idea of a ‘Philosopher King’ someone who would be a wisdom lover and develop the necessary qualities to rule over his people with wisdom and justice. This may have partly been a reaction to the demographic democracy he saw in Athens and a hesitation to rely on the ‘wisdom of the crowds,’ that prevailed in Athens at the time. He made the analogy that the philosopher-king was like a ship’s captain or doctor. Someone who knows best what his patient needs.

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,… nor, I think, will the human race.” ( Republic 473c-d)

To guard against philosopher-kings becoming tyrants, Plato also stated that they should be subject to the rule of law that limits the ruler’s actions

Style of Teaching

Plato didn’t write treatises and lectures, but wrote in an indirect way, encouraging the reader to ask questions and think for himself. Inspired by Socrates, he makes use of informal conversation and humorous anecdote. Like his teacher Socrates, Plato was happy to play the role of observer rather than a preacher. There is also signs of development and changes in thought, though some of this is due to uncertainty over whether letters ascribed to Plato, were actually written by him.

Plato and Aristotle

Aristotle didn’t agree with many conclusions of his teacher. For example, Aristotle felt the soul was an intrinsic part of the body. However, although Aristotle disagreed with Plato in some regards, he revered him as a supreme authority and person. His esteem for Plato was so great that he felt it would be “Blasphemy in the extreme even to praise him.” After Plato’s death, Aristotle started his own school – The Lyceum.

Death of Plato

There are conflicting reports on the death of Plato. But, he died between the ages of 81 and 84, and so was long-lived by ancient standards.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Plato”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , Originally published 26 February 2012. Last updated 8 March 2020.

Plato Quotes

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

― Plato, The Republic

“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”

Plato: Complete Works

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We explain who Plato was and what his most significant contributions were. In addition, we explore the stages of his thought and his relationship with Socrates.

Who was Plato?

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Athens, who lived between 427 and 347 BC . A disciple of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle , he is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of philosophy.

He is primarily known for having been the first philosopher to present his work in a rather systematic way . Among his most important ideas are: the theory of Forms (or theory of Ideas), the allegory of the cave and the famous Platonic dualism, which divides the world into a visible realm and an intelligible one.

In 387 BC he founded the Academy, a school of philosophy that lasted for 900 years and where mathematics, medicine, rhetoric and astronomy were taught, among other disciplines. Today the Academy is unanimously considered the first university in the Western world.

Plato's philosophy was compiled in various works, generally known as "Platonic dialogues" or “Plato’s dialogues” because of the way they are structured, which follows dialogue form. In them, Platonic concepts and ideas are presented through the different characters.

Traditionally divided according to the period in which they were written (youth, maturity and old age), most of the dialogues have Socrates as the main character. Only The Apology of Socrates , which presents his defense before the court that sentenced him to death, is not written in dialogue form.

• See also: Thales of Miletus

Life of Plato

Plato was born in Athens around 428 BC and died in the same city in 348 BC, at the age of 80. Son of Ariston and Perictione, he grew up alongside his three siblings (Adeimantus, Glaucon and Potone) and a stepbrother, Antiphon, son of his mother and Pyrilampes, a former friend of Pericles. His family was wealthy and aristocratic, descendants of the ancient king Codrus on his mother's side, niece of Critias.

Plato’s actual name was Aristocles , but was given the nickname "Plato", a reference to his physical broadness. According to Diogenes Laërtius, the nickname was given to him by his wrestling coach and is translated as "he who has broad shoulders".

Initially trained in arts such as painting, poetry and drama , before meeting Socrates Plato frequented Cratylus, the philosopher who introduced him to the ideas of Heraclitean “becoming”. Aristotle maintains that the theory of Ideas stems from the intersection of the Heraclitean impossibility of knowledge and Socrates' pursuit of definitions.

At the age of twenty he met Socrates. From that moment and until the death of his teacher, he constantly frequented his circle, becoming his disciple and close friend. Most of Plato's works feature Socrates as the main interlocutor , in the role of teacher and guide of those with whom he converses, discusses and frequents. Although the degree of fidelity of the Platonic Socrates (i.e. the Socrates described by Plato) to the historical Socrates is debated, it is undeniable that Plato knew him deeply and was his most prominent disciple.

Socrates died in 399 BC. Plato was then 28 years old and after the death of his teacher, he traveled to Sicily and Italy, where he came into contact with the Eleatics and Pythagoreans, schools that would have influenced him greatly.

After his journey to Sicily, and after being sold into slavery by the tyrant Dionysius and ransomed by the Cyrenaic Anniceris, Plato returned to Athens and settled in the suburbs, where he bought a country estate and founded the Academy . It operated both as a school and a university until the Middle Ages, that is as a center of academic and religious activities, where the gods were worshiped and anyone seeking tutoring was instructed.

At the Academy and for twenty years, Plato was teacher of Aristotle, his most prominent and most disruptive pupil.

Plato died in 347 BC at the age of 80 in the city of Athens, after devoting the last years of his life to teaching and educating young thinkers, friends and politicians.

Plato's contributions

The theory of ideas.

The theory of Ideas or theory of Forms is one of Plato's most significant contributions to philosophy. Broadly speaking, it draws a clear distinction between what is perceived through the senses and what can be known through the intellect , which are ideas or the forms of things. The word "idea" comes from the Greek eidos (εἶδος) and can be translated as "form”, "aspect," "type," or "species," depending on the use.

The most comprehensive presentation of this theory is in Parmenides , one of Plato’s works allegedly from his late period. A more accessible explanation appears in the Republic , in the Allegory of the Cave. In both cases, the distinction is made between the visible world of the senses and the invisible or intelligible realm, where ideas dwell.

• In the physical world are the things we know through the senses. These things are like images or traces of the forms or ideas in the intelligible world, which is inaccessible through the senses.
• In the intelligible realm are the ideas of which sensible objects are imitations. Ideas are the object of study of dialectic as the supreme science, and sensible objects mirror them because, as Plato vaguely states, they "participate" in the ideas and resemble them in an imperfect, degraded form.

One of the major criticisms to the theory of Ideas was made by Aristotle himself, a disciple of Plato. Aristotle argued that, while it is true that the essence of things as well as their form is what defines them, form is not independent of things. For Aristotle, form is inseparably linked to matter, and together they compose substance.

The Allegory of the Cave

The Allegory of the Cave is an allegory, i.e. a symbolic literary representation whose aim is pedagogical-philosophical . Alongside the Chariot allegory, it is the most decisive allegory in the history of philosophy. It tells the story of a group of prisoners, born chained inside a cave where they could only see a back blank wall, upon which the shadows of the real world were projected.

Plato introduces the Allegory of the Cave at the beginning of Book VII of the Republic to explain the situation of humans in relation to knowledge . This text describes how both the physical world and the intelligible realm are perceived (the former through the senses and the latter through the soul, since like it in the intelligible world all things are eternal and immortal).

According to Plato, the prisoners who inhabit the cave, chained from birth, can only see the shadows that a fire hidden behind a wall reflects against the back of the cave . These shadows are produced by men walking along a corridor carrying different objects. The prisoners, unaware of where the shadows come from, believe they are the truth of things.

What the Allegory of the Cave holds is that if any of the prisoners were freed and turned their gaze towards the light of the fire, they would be confronted with a higher reality , which is the cause of the reality of the shadows. Eventually, the prisoner could escape to the outside of the cave where he would see a more perfect world, until forced to look directly at the sun. This would, however, blind him and if he wanted to return to the cave and free his companions, they would do nothing but mock him and, according to Plato, might even be capable of killing him (a clear reference to what happened to Socrates).

There are various interpretations of the allegory . Plato himself offers one towards the end of Book VI and in Book VII of the Republic . Possible explanations are epistemological (regarding knowledge), ontological (concerning being), educational, and even political. These interpretations remain an area of contention among scholars up to the present.

Platonic dualism

Platonic dualism is the conception of the body and soul as separate . In Plato, dualism spans to a division of the world into the perfect and the imperfect. If perfection is that which is immortal, everlasting, eternal, unchangeable and necessary, imperfection is that which is temporal, changeable and corruptible.

This results in the division between the physical world and the intelligible realm . The physical world is imperfect, formed by matter, to which the body is subject. All things that exist in the sensible world are made in the manner and likeness of the perfect, represented by forms in the intelligible realm. This is related to the soul, and is the place where things like it reside: like the soul, ideas are eternal, unchangeable and necessary.

From this separation arises the Platonic idea that the body is the prison of the soul and that with the end of the body, the soul is free and perfect once again until it reincarnates in a different body.

There are other possible interpretations or readings of dualism, such as its implications on knowledge: according to Platonic dualism, opinion (which is the form of sensible knowledge) is opposed to episteme (which is intelligible knowledge). This conception of knowledge is known as epistemological dualism.

Finally, it is possible to observe emerge even deeper traits of ontological dualism (the dualism which explains the separation of reality into two worlds), such as the problem of the interaction between both worlds, or the problem of anthropological dualism, for example, which sees the human being as a composite of body and soul and questions how this is possible.

The works of Plato

It is believed that Plato's entire body of work has survived intact to the present day . All of his works with the exception of the Apology of Socrates are written in dialogue form. Beyond the theme or question that concerns each one, most of the works present an explanation of the Socratic method, shown through the conversations between Socrates and the various interlocutors embodied in the people or famous thinkers of the time.

Although some are based on real facts, many of Plato’s dialogues are fictional scenarios created by Plato to provide the setting to postulate his various theses and fundamental ideas. Narrated in the form of myths or allegories, these ideas relate to the immortality of the soul (expounded in the Phaedrus ), the myth of Eros (presented in the Symposium ), and the example of the slave and reminiscence (which appears in Meno ), among others.

While it is true that these works constitute the corpus of writings published during his lifetime, they should not be considered Plato's explicit teachings. The fact that they are narrated in dialogue form and through the use of myth and allegory indicates that, in any case, what is actually found there is material for interpretation. In addition to publishing his works, Plato taught orally at the Academy, and it is therefore believed that there is a written teaching, which is found in the dialogues, as well as an oral teaching , possibly dedicated to the exegesis (the philosophical interpretation of his ideas), reserved for his pupils.

Plato believed that the written language was only a copy of the spoken language, and the voice was the direct access to intelligence and knowledge accumulated in the soul , which was intelligible. This interpretative thesis is supported in Phaedrus , as well as in other works of Plato, such as the Seventh Letter , where he asserts that some things cannot be expressed in words. Nonetheless, the fact that Plato advocated oral teaching does not detract from the merit and philosophical prestige of his published works, a legacy that has survived to the present day.

Among Plato's most important works are:

• The Apology of Socrates . It is the only Platonic text which is not written in dialogue form. It presents the trial and defense of Socrates before he is sentenced to drink the hemlock.
• Gorgias . It is a dialogue that presents Platonic ideas regarding rhetoric, politics and justice.
• Meno . It is the text in which the teaching of virtue and the idea of knowledge as reminiscence appear for the first time.
• Phaedo . It is a text that deals with the immortality of the soul, a thesis defended by Socrates before his death, already in prison.
• The Symposium . It is a text in which, during a banquet or dinner among friends, they discuss what is love is, its various myths and the erotic ascent proposed by Socrates to attain beauty.
• The Republic . It consists of a reflection on the concept of justice and how it is expressed in the human being. It also includes the famous Allegory of the Cave, that of the sun, and other myths and metaphors.
• Phaedrus . This dialogue focuses on the ideas of love, beauty and the destiny of the soul. It presents the Chariot allegory to explain the Platonic view of the soul.
• The Timaeus . It is one of the last dialogues written by Plato, where he presents complex issues regarding cosmology and physics, such as the origin of the universe and of living beings.

Stages of Plato's thought according to his works

Plato's philosophical work, through his dialogues, is usually divided into four major periods:

• Socratic period (393-389 B.C.). During this period Plato disseminated some of his theses based on the teachings of Socrates. In them he addresses concepts such as falsehood, piety and friendship. Some of his works published during this period were: Apology of Socrates, Crito, Ion or On Poetry, Lysis or On Friendship, Charmides and Protagoras.
• Transition period (389-385 B.C.). During this period Plato founded the Academy, which proved key in deepening and developing sciences such as mathematics and astronomy. He postulated theories based on the teachings of Socrates and Pythagoras , and developed his own concepts about the immortality of the soul, virtue and language. Some of his works published during this period were: Hippias Major, Gorgias, Menexenus and Meno.
• Maturity period (385-361 B.C.). In this period, which was the most outstanding, Plato developed his ideas on the immortality of the soul, the Theory of Reminiscence (which asserted the existence of certain innate knowledge in the human being), the Theory of Ascending Dialectics (which refined Socrates' maieutics and contemplated the cause-effect relationship of that which is observed), the concept of love (which opposed to "Platonic love") and his political philosophy. Some of his works published during this period are: The Republic, Phaedrus, Phaedo and The Symposium.
• Late period (361-347 B.C.). During his old age, Plato made a thorough revision of the Theory of Ideas . This theory posits a duality of reality in the sensible world (what is perceived through the senses), and the intelligible realm (what can be known through the intellect). In addition, he explored concepts related to nature and medicine. Some of his works published during this period were: Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist and The Statesman.
• Guthrie, W. (1988). Historia de la filosofía griega, vol. IV. Platón, el hombre y sus diálogos: primera época. Gredos.
• Guthrie, W. (1988). Historia de la filosofía griega, vol. V. Platón, segunda época y la Academia. Gredos.
• Guthrie, W. (1953). Los filósofos griegos. De Tales a Aristóteles . FCE.
• Ross, W. D. (1993). Teoría de las Ideas de Platón . Cátedra.
• Cordero, N. (2008). La invención de la filosofía. Una introducción a la filosofía antigua . Editorial Biblos.
• “Plato” in Britannica .
• “Una introducción a la Teoría de las ideas de Platón” in Universia .
• “Platón” in Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes .

Related articles:

• René Descartes
• Aristotelian Thought
• "I think, therefore I am"

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Plato’s Ethics: An Overview

Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or well-being ( eudaimonia ) is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues ( aretê : ‘excellence’) are the dispositions/skills needed to attain it. If Plato’s conception of happiness is elusive and his support for a morality of happiness seems somewhat subdued, there are several reasons. First, he nowhere defines the concept of happiness nor makes it the direct target of investigation but introduces it in an oblique way in the pursuit of other questions. Second, the treatment of the human good varies in the different dialogues, so that readers find themselves confronted with the problem of what to make of the discrepancies between different works. This touches on a fundamental problem with Plato’s work – namely, whether to follow a ‘unitarian’, ‘revisionist’, or ‘developmentalist’ approach to his writings. Whereas unitarians regard the dialogues as pieces of one mosaic and take the view that Plato, in essence, maintains a unified doctrine from his earliest to his latest works, revisionists maintain that Plato’s thought underwent a fundamental transformation later in his life, while ‘developmentalists’ hold that Plato’s views evolved significantly throughout his career. While revisionism has lost its impact in recent years, developmentalism has gained in influence. Although there is no unanimity, few unitarians nowadays deny that the character of Plato’s early, middle, and late works differs in style, language, scope, and content, as is to be expected in a philosopher who was at work for more than fifty years. Most developmentalists, in turn, agree that it is impossible to line up Plato’s works like pearls on a string and to reconstruct his progress from dialogue to dialogue; where the views expressed in different dialogues seem to disagree, there may be complementation or supplementation at work, rather than divergence. Given that Plato never speaks in his own voice, it is important to take note of who the interlocutors are and what role is assigned to Socrates, if he is the main speaker. Plato’s dialogues should never be treated in isolation when it comes to the reconstruction of his doctrine; but even the comparison and contrasting of ideas presented in different dialogues is not a safe recipe for interpreting this elusive thinker’s views (for a more detailed discussion see the entry on Plato ).

Plato’s so-called ‘Socratic’ dialogues share certain characteristics as a group. They are short interrogations by Socrates of the kind indicated in his explanation of his divine mission in the Apology . They seem designed, inter alia, to undermine unquestioned traditional views and values rather than to develop positive accounts. The positive accounts contained in the middle, the so-called ‘Platonic’, dialogues – that are grouped around the Republic – treat happiness in different ways as a state of perfection in a moral as well as in an intellectual sense. The exact nature of this state of mind is not easy to pinpoint, however, because it is based on metaphysical presuppositions that are, at least prima facie, both hazy and out of the realm of ordinary understanding. There is not, as there is in Aristotle, an explicit determination of happiness as the actualization of one’s best potential in a well-organized community. Instead, at least in some texts, Plato’s moral ideals appear both austere and self-abnegating: The soul is to remain aloof from the pleasures of the body in the pursuit of higher knowledge, while communal life demands the subordination of individual wishes and aims to the common good.

The difficulties of assessing Plato’s ethical thought are compounded by the fact that the metaphysical underpinnings seem to change during his long life. In the Socratic dialogues, there are no indications that the search for virtue and the human good goes beyond the human realm. This changes in the middle dialogues that show a growing interest in an all-encompassing metaphysical grounding of knowledge, a development that leads to the positing of the ‘Forms’ as the determinants of the true nature of all things, culminating in the Form of the Good as the transcendent principle of all goodness. Though the theory of the Forms is not confined to human values but encompasses the whole of nature, Plato, in the middle dialogues, seems to assume no more than an analogy between human affairs and cosmic harmony. The late dialogues, by contrast, display an increasing tendency to assume a unity of the microcosm of human life and the macrocosmic order of the entire universe, a tendency that is displayed most fully in the Philebus and the Timaeus . While these holistic tendencies appeal to the imagination because they rely on harmonic relations expressed in mathematical proportions, the metaphysical status of the Forms is even harder to make out in the late dialogues than in the middle dialogues. Though Plato’s late works do not show any willingness to lower the standards of knowledge as such, Plato indicates that his design of a rational cosmic order is based on conjecture and speculation, an acknowledgment that finds its counterpart in his more pragmatic treatment of ethical standards and political institutions in his last political work, the Laws .

1. Preliminaries

2.1 the aporetic procedure, 2.2 the quest for definition.

• 3.1 Human nature and its needs

3.2 Virtues of state and soul

3.3 the desire for self-perfection, 3.4 the quest for method.

• 4 .1 Harmony and cosmic goodness
• 4 .2 Measure for measure

Translations

Single-authored overviews, anthologies, problems of chronology, studies on plato’s dialogues, other internet resources, related entries.

If ethics is widely regarded as the most accessible branch of philosophy, it is so because many of its presuppositions are, seemingly, self-evident or trivial truths: All human actions, for example, serve some end or purpose; whether they are right or wrong depends on the agent’s overall aims. At least for secularists, the attainment of these overall aims is regarded as a major condition of the good life. What we regard as a life worth living also depends on the notion we have of our own nature and of the conditions of its fulfillment. This, in turn, is determined, at least in part, by the values and standards of the society we live in. Personal ends and purposes depend in each case not only on reason, but also on the individual agents’ dispositions (i.e., their ingrained likes and dislikes, which determine their personal character). The attainment of these ends can also depend at least in part on external factors, such as health, material prosperity, social status, and even on good looks or sheer luck.

Although these presuppositions may seem self-evident, most of the time, human beings are aware of them only implicitly because they lead their lives in accordance with pre-established standards and values that are, under normal circumstances, not objects of reflection. It is only in times of crisis that a society’s traditions and precepts are challenged by someone like Socrates, who sees the need to disturb his fellows’ complacency. The historical Socrates was, of course, not the first to question the Greek way of life. Presocratic philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus, or Empedocles had been critics of their times, and the sophists had argued provocatively that, contrary to the naïve view, it is custom and convention, rather than nature that set the standards for what is deemed right or wrong, good or bad, in every society. But if other thinkers preceded Socrates with moral and social criticism, he was certainly the first to challenge his fellows on an individual basis on the ground that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ ( Ap . 38a). Whatever position one may take in the controversy concerning the degree to which Plato’s early dialogues are true to the historical Socrates’ discussions, the independent testimony of Xenophon leaves little doubt that Socrates’ cross-examinations ( elenchos ) provoked the kind of enmity against him that led to his conviction and execution. In the eyes of conservative Athenians, Socrates’ questioning undermined the traditional values of their society. As Socrates saw it, the ‘virtues’ – which is to say the social skills, attitudes, and character-traits possessed by most Athenian citizens of his time – were all too often geared towards their possessors’ wealth, power, and capacities for self-indulgence, to the detriment of public morality and the community’s well-being (see the entry on Socrates ).

The Socratic legacy prompted Plato to engage in a thorough examination of the nature of knowledge and reality, an examination that gradually took him far beyond the scope of the historical Socrates’ discussions. Nevertheless, Plato continued to present most of his investigations as dialogues between Socrates and some partner or partners. And Plato preserved the dialogical form even in those of his late works where Socrates is replaced by a stand-in and where the didactic nature of the presentations is hard to reconcile with the pretense of live discussion. But these didactic discourses continue to combine questions of ethical, political, social, or psychological importance with metaphysical, methodological, and epistemological considerations. And it can be hard to assess the extent to which Plato agrees with the pronouncements of his speakers, whether that speaker is Socrates or anyone else. Furthermore, the fact that a certain ethical problem or its solution is not mentioned in a certain dialogue does not mean that Plato was unaware of it. There is, therefore, no certainty concerning the question: “What did Plato see and when did he first see it?” The lack of information about the order in which Plato wrote his works adds to this difficulty. It stands to reason, however, that he started with the short dialogues that question traditional virtues – wisdom, courage, justice, moderation, piety. It also stands to reason that Plato gradually widened the scope of his investigations by reflecting not only on the social and political conditions of morality but also on the logical, epistemological, and metaphysical presuppositions of a successful moral theory. These theoretical reflections often take on a life of their own. Several of Plato’s later works address ethical problems only marginally or not at all. The Parmenides , the Theaetetus , and the Sophist deal primarily or exclusively with epistemological and metaphysical problems of a quite general nature. Nevertheless, as witnessed by the Philebus , the Statesman , the Timaeus , and the Laws , Plato never lost interest in the question of the conditions of the good human life.

2. The early dialogues: Examining life

The early ‘Socratic’ dialogues are not concerned with the question of the good life and its conditions in general but rather with particular virtues. Socrates explores these virtues through discussions with persons who are regarded either as representatives of, or claim to be experts on, that virtue. Socrates’ justification for this procedure is that a paragon or expert must know the property that characterizes his particular virtue and must, therefore, be able to give an account or definition of it (cf. Xenophon Memorabilia I, 10; 16). Thus, in the Euthyphro , Socrates discusses piety/holiness with an alleged ‘expert’ on religious affairs. In the Laches , he discusses courage with two renowned generals in the Peloponnesian war, Laches and Nicias. Similarly, in the Charmides , Socrates addresses – somewhat ironically – the nature of moderation with two of the later Thirty Tyrants, namely with the then very young Charmides, an alleged model of modesty, and his guardian and intellectual mentor, Critias. In the Greater Hippias , Socrates raises the question of the nature of the beautiful with a producer of ‘beautiful things’, the sophist and polymath Hippias. In the Protagoras , Socrates focuses on the question of the unity of virtue in a discussion with Protagoras, the most famous teacher of ‘civic virtues’ among the sophists. And in the Gorgias , Socrates discusses the nature of rhetoric and its relation to virtue with the most prominent teacher of rhetoric among the sophists. Finally, in the Meno , the question of how virtue as such is acquired is raised by Meno, a disciple of Gorgias and an ambitious seeker of power, wealth, and fame, who later met a gruesome death in Persia in the pursuit of those very values.

Socrates’ interlocutors are usually, at first, quite confident about their own competence in the discussion. And such confidence is not unreasonable. If virtue is a kind of ‘skill’ or a special property that enjoys general recognition, its possessor should know and be able to give an account of that skill or proficiency. As Socrates’ examinations demonstrate, however, such self-confidence is usually unfounded, and the ‘knowledge’ professed by Socrates’ partners is revealed to be, at best, an implicit familiarity. When they are confronted with their inability to explain the nature of their cherished virtue or expertise, they end up admitting their ignorance, but often with considerable chagrin or anger (on the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, see the entry in SEP Plato ’ s Shorter Ethical Works by Paul Woodruff). Socrates’ purpose in conducting these sometimes cruel-looking games is not just to undermine the false confidence of his interlocutors but also to pave the way towards general definitions and standards concerning the virtues. There were no widely acknowledged standards of definition in Socrates’ time, but by exposing the flaws in his partners’ abortive arguments in his investigations, Socrates contributed significantly to the development of such standards. The respective flaws vary greatly in kind and gravity: Socrates shows that enumerations of examples are not sufficient to capture the nature or essence of the virtue in question. Definitions that consist in the replacement of the concept in question with a synonym are open to the same objections as the original definition. Definitions may be hopelessly vague or miss the mark entirely, which is to say that they may be either too wide and include unwanted characteristics or subsets, or too narrow so that they exclude essential characteristics. Moreover, definitions may be incomplete because the object in question does not constitute a unitary phenomenon. If generally accepted ‘social excellences’ are not simple conditions, they may be subject to conflicting convictions. Examples of all these problems are provided in Plato’s early dialogues, where Socrates exposes the exact nature of the underlying deficiencies with more or less diagnostic transparency.

Given that the focus in the early dialogues is almost entirely on the exposure of flaws and inconsistencies, one cannot help wondering whether Plato himself knew the answers to his queries and had some cards up his sleeve that he chose not to play for the time being. This would presuppose that Plato had not only a clear notion of the nature of the different virtues but also a definitive conception of the good life as such. Since Plato was neither a moral nihilist nor a sceptic, he cannot have regarded moral perplexity ( aporia ) as the ultimate end, nor regarded continued mutual examination, Socratico more , as a way of life for everyone. Perplexity, as is argued in the Meno , is just a wholesome intermediary stage on the way to knowledge ( Me . 84a–b). But if Plato assumes that the convictions that survive Socratic questioning will eventually coalesce into a coherent account of the good life, then he keeps this expectation to himself. Nor would such optimism seem warranted, given Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge. There is no guarantee that only false convictions are refuted in a Socratic cross-examination, while true ones are retained – for promising suggestions are often as mercilessly discarded as their less promising brethren. Perhaps Plato counted on his readers’ intelligence to straighten out what is skewed in Socratic refutations, as well as to detect unfair moves and to supplement what is missing. It is, in fact, often not difficult to make out problematic or fallacious moves in Socrates’ argument and to correct them, but such corrections must remain incomplete without sufficient information about Plato’s overall conception of the good life and its moral presuppositions at that point in time. It is, therefore, a matter of conjecture whether Plato himself held any positive views while he composed one aporetic dialogue after the other. He may have regarded his investigations as experimental stages or have seen each dialogue as an element in a network of approaches that he hoped to integrate eventually.

If there is a general lesson to be drawn from the many failed accounts of the virtues by Socrates’ different partners, beyond the particular shortcomings of individual definitions and assertions, it is that isolated definitions of single virtues, summed up in one sentence, will not do. The evidence that Plato wanted his readers to draw this very conclusion already in his early dialogues is somewhat contradictory, however. He famously pleads for the unity of the virtues in the Protagoras and seems intent to reduce them all to knowledge. Scholars are, therefore, wont to speak of the ‘intellectualistic’ character of the so-called ‘Socratic ethics’ because it leaves no room for other motivational forces, such as desires and emotions. Socrates’ proof in the Protagoras that reason cannot be overcome by the passions has, from Aristotle on, been treated as a denial of akrasia , of the phenomenon that was later somewhat misleadingly dubbed as ‘weakness of the will’. This intellectualizing tendency does not tell us, however, what kind of master-science would fulfill all of the requirements for defining virtues, nor what its content should be. Moreover, the emphasis on knowledge does not rule out an awareness on Plato’s part of the importance of other factors, even in his early dialogues. Though Plato often compares the virtues with technical skills, such as those of a doctor or a pilot, he may have realized that virtues also involve emotional attitudes, desires, and preferences but not yet have seen a clear way to coordinate or combine the rational and the affective elements that constitute the virtues. In the Laches , for instance, Socrates’ partners struggle when they try to define courage, invoking two different elements. In his attempt to define courage as ‘steadfastness in battle’, Laches, one of the two generals and ‘experts’ on courage, is faced with the dilemma that steadfastness seems not to be a satisfactory definition of courage either in itself or in combination with knowledge ( La . 192a–194c). His comrade Nicias, on the other hand, fails when he tries to identify courage exclusively as a certain type of knowledge (197e–200a). The investigation of moderation in the Charmides , likewise, points up that there are two disparate elements commonly associated with that virtue – namely, a certain calmness of temper on the one hand ( Chrm . 158e–160d) and self-knowledge on the other (166e–175a). It is clear that a complex account would be needed to combine these two disparate features, for moral skills not only presuppose sufficient ‘operative’ rationality but also require appropriate evaluative and emotional attitudes towards the ends to be attained and towards the means to be employed. Such an insight is at least indicated in Socrates’ long and passionate argument in the Gorgias against Polus and Callicles that the just life is better for the soul of its possessor than the unjust life, an argument that he fortifies with a mythical depiction of the soul’s reward and punishment after death (523a–527e). But the nature of justice, and what is required for the proper care of one’s soul, is thereby illuminated only indirectly. For the most part, Socrates’ interrogations focus on the incompatibility of his interlocutors’ selfish aims with their more selfless and noble tendencies. In his earlier dialogues, Plato may or may not already be envisaging the kind of solution that he is going to present in the Republic to the problem of the relationship between the different virtues, with wisdom, the only purely intellectual virtue, as their basis. Courage, moderation, and justice presuppose a certain steadfastness of character as well as a harmony of purpose between the disparate parts of the soul, but their goodness depends entirely on the intellectual part of the soul, just as the virtue of the citizens in the just state depends on the wisdom of the philosopher kings ( R . 428a–444e). The existence of ‘demotic’ virtues of character is thus acknowledged, but they are relegated to second place (500d; 522a–b).

There are at least some indications that Plato already saw the need for a holistic conception of the good life when he composed his ‘Socratic’ dialogues. At the end of the Laches , he lets Nicias founder in his attempt to define courage as the ‘knowledge of what is to be feared and what should inspire confidence’. Nicias is forced to admit that such knowledge presupposes the knowledge of good and bad tout court ( La . 199c–e). In a different but related way, Socrates alludes to a comprehensive knowledge at the end of the Charmides . In his final refutation of Critias’ definition of moderation as ‘knowledge of knowledge’, he urges that this type of knowledge is insufficient for the happy life without the knowledge of good and bad ( Chrm . 174b–e). Pointing out what is wrong or missing in particular arguments is a far cry from a philosophical conception of the ultimate good in human life. But the fact that Plato insists on the shortcomings of a purely ‘technical’ conception of virtue suggests that he was at least facing up to these problems. The discussion of the ‘unity of the virtues’ in the Protagoras – regardless of the probably intentionally unsatisfactory structure of its proofs – confirms that Plato realized that a critique of the inconsistencies implied in conventional values is insufficient to justify such a unitary point of view. Nevertheless, the evidence that Plato already had a unified conception of the good life in mind when he wrote his earlier dialogues remains, at most, indirect.

It may be helpful to begin with a consideration of the method of ethical inquiry that Socrates is portrayed as using in the early dialogues. A reflection on the meaning of Socrates’ quest for definitions in the early dialogues suggests that Plato cannot have been blind to the sterility of a purely negative way of argument, or if he was blind at first, his blindness cannot have lasted long, for Socrates’ quest for definitions has important consequences. First and foremost, definitions presuppose that there is a definable object; that is to say, it must have a stable nature. Nothing can be defined that is of a variable nature. In addition, the object in question must be a unitary phenomenon, even if its unity may be complex. If definitions are to provide the basis of knowledge, they require some kind of essentialism. This presupposition is indeed made explicit in the Euthyphro , where Plato employs, for the first time, the terminology that will be characteristic of his full-fledged theory of Forms. In response to Euthyphro’s enumeration of various examples of pious behavior, Socrates demands an account of the one feature ( Euthphr . 5d: idea ; 6d: eidos ; 6e: paradeigma ) that is common to all cases of what is holy or pious. Despite this pregnant terminology, few scholars nowadays hold that the Euthyphro already presupposes transcendent Forms, in a realm of their own – models that are only incompletely represented by their representatives under material conditions. The terms eidos and idea had preserved their original meaning of ‘look’ or ‘shape’ into the classical age, but they were also often used in the more abstract sense of ‘form’, ‘sort’, ‘type’, or ‘kind’. No more than piety or holiness in the abstract sense seems to be presupposed in the discussion of the Euthyphro . There is, at any rate, no mention of any separation of a sensible and an intelligible realm, let alone of an existence of ‘the holy itself’, as a transcendent entity.

The passage in the Euthyphro where Socrates asks Euthyphro to identify the one feature that is common to all that is holy or pious makes intelligible, however, the reason why Plato felt encouraged to develop the conception of transcendent Forms. The requisite unity and invariance of entities such as ‘the holy’, ‘the beautiful’, ‘the just’, or ‘the equal’, necessarily prompts reflections on their ontological status and on the appropriate means of access to them. Given that they are the objects of definition and the models of their ordinary representatives, there is every reason not only to treat them as real but also to assign to them a higher kind of unity and perfection. And once this step has been taken, it is only natural to make certain epistemological adjustments, for access to paradigmatic entities is not to be expected through ordinary experience but presupposes some special kind of intellectual insight. It seems, then, that once Plato had accepted invariant and unitary objects of thought as the subject of definition, he was predestined to follow the path that led him to adopt a metaphysics and epistemology of transcendent Forms. The very fact that mathematics was already an established science with rigorous standards and unitary and invariant objects seems to have greatly enhanced Plato’s confidence in applying the same standards in moral philosophy. It led him to search for models of morality beyond the limits of everyday experience. This, in turn, explains the development of his theory of recollection and the postulate of Forms as transcendent, immaterial objects as the basis of both reality and thought that he refers to in the Meno and that he presents more fully in the Phaedo .

We do not know when, precisely, Plato adopted this mode of thought, but it stands to reason that his contact with the Pythagorean school on his first voyage to Southern Italy and Sicily around 390 BC played a major role in that development. Mathematics as a model-science has several advantages. It deals with unchangeable entities that have precise definitions. It also makes plausible the claim that the essence of these entities cannot be comprehended in isolation but only in a network of interconnections that have to be worked out at the same time as each particular entity is defined. Thus, to understand what it is to be a triangle, it is necessary – inter alia – to have a clear notion of the nature of points, lines, planes, and their interrelations. That Plato was aware of that fact is indicated in his introduction of the theory of recollection in the Meno , 81d: “As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only – a process men call learning – discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search; for searching and learning, are, as a whole, recollection ( anamnesis ).” The somewhat mystifying claim of an ‘overall kinship’ is then illuminated by the famous ‘mathematical experiment’ ( Me . 82b–85c). The slave manages, with some pushing and pulling by Socrates, and thanks to some illustrations drawn in the sand, to double the area of a given square. In the course of this interrogation, the disciple gradually discovers the relations between the different lines, triangles, and squares. That Plato regards these interconnections as crucial features of knowledge is subsequently confirmed by the distinction that Socrates draws between knowledge and true belief (97b–98b). As he argues, true beliefs are unreliable because they behave like ‘the statues of Daedalus that easily run away as long as they are not tied down’. The requisite ‘tying down’ happens (98a) “by giving an account of the reason why. And that, Meno my friend, is recollection, as we previously agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place, they become knowledge, and then they remain in place.” This explanation indicates that, according to Plato, knowledge does not consist in a mere mental ‘gazing’ at isolated models but rather in uncovering the invariant relations and interrelations that constitute the objects in question.

The complexity underlying Plato’s theory of the Forms as it surfaces in the Phaedo is easily overlooked because its discussion initially suggests that recollection is no more than the grasping of concepts. Thus, the concept of ‘exact equality in size’ is prompted by the perception of more or less equal-seeming sticks and stones (74a–e). The same condition applies to the other examples of Forms, 65d–e: “Do we say that there is such a thing as the Just itself or not? And the Beautiful, and the Good? […] I am speaking of all things such as Tallness, Health, Strength, and in a word, the reality of all other things, that which each of them essentially is.” But Plato does not employ his newly established metaphysical entities as the basis for working out a definitive conception of the human soul and the appropriate way of life in the Phaedo . Rather, he confines himself to warnings against the contamination of the soul by the senses and their pleasures, and quite generally against corruption by worldly values. He gives no advice concerning human conduct beyond the recommendation of a general abstemiousness from worldly temptations. This seems a rather austere picture of human life, and an egocentric one, to boot, for nothing is said about relations between human beings beyond Socrates’ exhortations that his friends should likewise take care of their souls as best they can. It is unclear whether this otherworldly and ascetic attitude is the sign of a particularly pessimistic period in Plato’s life or whether it merely reflects the circumstances of the discussion – Socrates’ impending death. But as long as this negative or otherworldly attitude towards the physical side of human nature prevails, no interest is to be expected on the part of Plato in nature as a whole – let alone in the principles of the cosmic order (but cf. 5.1 below). But it is not only the apparent asceticism that stands in the way of a wider perspective. Socrates himself seems to have been quite indifferent to the study of nature. While in the Phaedo Socrates confesses his inability to deal with the causes of natural processes, the Apology contains an energetic denial of any concern with natural philosophy on Socrates’ side. The accusations that depict him as “a student of all things in the sky and below the earth” are quite unfounded (18c); he has never conversed on such issues at all, and the attribution to him of the Anaxagorean tenet that the sun is a stone and the moon consists of earth is a sign of his accusers’ recklessness (26d–e). Similarly, in the Phaedrus , Socrates explains his preference for the city and his avoidance of nature (230d): “Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me – only the people in the city can do that.” That Plato is not distorting the facts here is confirmed by the testimony of Xenophon, who is equally emphatic about Socrates’ repudiation of the study of heavenly phenomena and his concentration on human affairs ( Memorabilia I 1.15–16). If Plato later takes a much more positive attitude towards nature in general, this is a considerable change of focus. In the Phaedo , he quite deliberately confines his account of the nature of heaven and earth, with its heavenly order and hellish geography, to the myth about the soul’s afterlife (108d–114c). As he states in conclusion, this mythical depiction is not to be taken literally but as an encouragement to heed its moral message and to take care of one’s soul (114d–e). This is as constructive as Plato gets in his earlier treatment of the principles of ethics.

3. The middle dialogues: Justice and other virtues

3.1 human nature and its deficiencies.

If Plato went through a period of open-ended experimentation and tentative suggestions, this stage was definitely over by the time he wrote the Republic , the central work of his middle years. Because of the Republic ’s importance, a more detailed account will be provided here in order to explain the ethical principles set forth in that work, for these principles are closely intertwined with Plato’s political, psychological, and metaphysical conceptions. That the work represents a major change in Plato’s thinking is indicated already by the dialogue’s setting. The aporetic controversy about justice in the Republic ’s first book is set off quite sharply against the constructive discussion that ensues in its remaining nine books. Like the Gorgias , the first book presents three interlocutors who defend, with increasing vigor and contentiousness, their notion of justice against Socrates’ elenchos . Of these disputes, the altercation with the sophist Thrasymachus has received the most attention because he defends the provocative thesis that natural justice is the right of the stronger and that conventional justice is, at best, high-minded foolishness. The counter-arguments employed by Socrates at the various turns of the discussion will not be presented here. Though they reduce Thrasymachus to angry silence, they are not above criticism. Socrates himself expresses dissatisfaction with the result of this discussion R . 354c: “As far as I am concerned, the result is that I know nothing, for when I don’t know what justice is, I’ll hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy.” But for once, the speakers’ confession of aporia is not the end of the discussion. At the beginning of the next book, two members of the audience, Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, challenge Socrates: Perhaps Thrasymachus has defended his case badly, but if Socrates wants to convince his audience, he must do better than that. The brothers demand a positive account both of what justice is and of what it does to the soul of its possessor.

The change of character in the subsequent discussion is remarkable. Not only are the two brothers not subjected to elenchos , they get ample time to elaborate on their objections (357a–367e). Though they profess not to be convinced that injustice is better than justice, they argue that, in the present state of society, injustice pays – with the gods as well as with humans – as long as the semblance of respectability is preserved. To prove this claim, the brothers play devil’s advocate by unfolding a scathing picture of their society’s attitude towards justice. As the story of the Ring of Gyges and its gift of invisibility proves, everyone who does not have a god-like character will eventually succumb to such a ring’s temptations (359c–360d). Instead of the wolf of Thrasymachus’ account, it is the wily fox who is the paragon of injustice (365a-d). He will succeed at every level because he knows how to play the power-game with cunning. The just man, by contrast, pays no heed to the mere semblance of goodness but rather to its substance and, therefore, must suffer a Christ-like fate because he does not comply with the demands of favoritism and blandishment (361e). Even the gods, as the poets confirm, are on the side of the successful scoundrel since they can be propitiated by honors and sacrifices. Given this state of affairs, a logic-chopping argument that justice is better than injustice is quite insufficient (367b–e: logôi ). Instead, Socrates must show what effect each of them has on the souls of their possessors. As this critique indicates, Plato, at this point, clearly regards refutation as an insufficient way of making true converts. Whether he ever had such confidence in the power of refutation must remain a moot point. But the Republic shows that the time had come for a positive account of morality and of the good life. If elenchos is used in Plato’s later dialogues, it is never again used in the knock-down fashion of the early dialogues. But in his treatment of justice, Plato does not directly resort to the theory of Forms. Instead, he develops a political and psychological model as a solution to the problem of the nature of justice. That there is also a metaphysical way to determine the nature of justice is indicated only briefly and enigmatically when Plato speaks of a ‘longer way’ that would also have been possible for him to take (435d; 504b)

A brief sketch of Plato’s inquiry into the nature of justice must suffice here to make intelligible his distinction of justice from the other kinds of virtue and of their role in the good life (for a more penetrating analysis, see the entry Plato ’ s Ethics and Politics by Eric Brown). This question is addressed in a quite circuitous way. Justice is first to be studied in the ‘larger text’ of the state rather than in the hard-to-decipher ‘small text’ of the individual soul. A study of how a city comes to be will supposedly reveal the origin of justice and injustice (369a). Its founding principle is – at least at first – no high-minded concern of humankind, but mutual economic need : “A city comes to be because none of us is self-sufficient ( autarkês ), but we all need many things. … And because people need many things, and because one person calls on a second out of one need ( chreia ) and on a third out of a different need, many people gather in a single place to live together as partners and helpers.” The ‘need’ is, at least at this point, purely economic. The minimal city is based on the need for food, clothing, shelter, and for the requisite tools. It is economic efficiency that dictates the adoption of the principle of the ‘division of functions’: It is best if everyone performs the task s/he is naturally most fit for. This principle determines not only the structure of the minimal, self-subsistent state of farmers and craftsmen but also the subsequent division of the city’s inhabitants into three classes in the ‘fevered state’ that caters to higher demands, for a more luxurious city needs protection by a professional army as well as the leadership of a class of philosopher-kings and -queens. Beyond the claim that the division of functions is more economical, Plato gives no justification for this fateful decision that determines the social order in the state, as well as the nature of the virtues. Human beings are not born alike but with different abilities that predestine them for different tasks in a well-ordered state. This leads to Plato’s principle: ‘one person – one job’ ( R . 370a–c; 423d).

Because the division of functions paves the way for the definition of justice as ‘doing your own thing and not meddling with that of others’ in Book IV (432d–433b), it is necessary to briefly review the kind of social order Plato has in mind, the psychological principles he assumes, and the political institutions by which that order is to be secured, for this explains not only the establishment of a three-class society and the explanation of the corresponding structure of the soul but also Plato’s theory of education and the metaphysical underpinnings. That economic needs are the basis of the political structure does not, of course, mean that they are the only human needs Plato recognizes. It indicates, however, that the emphasis here is on the unity and self-sufficiency of a well-structured city, not on the well-being of the individual (423c–e; 425c). This focus should be kept in mind when assessing the ‘totalitarianism’ and the rigorous cultural conservatism of the political philosophy of Plato’s middle years.

The need for a professionally trained army leads to the discussion of education and moral psychology because the preservation of internal peace and external security presupposes the combination of two quite different character-traits among the ‘guardians’ (‘the philosophical watchdogs’, 375d–376c): friendliness towards their fellow-citizens and fierceness towards their enemies. The injunctions concerning the citizens’ education are very detailed because it must combine the right kind of ‘muses’ (poetry, music, and other fine arts) with the appropriate physical training in order to develop the right temperament and attitude in the soldiers (376d–403d). The organisation and supervision of education is the special task of the third class, that of the rulers of the city (412b–417b). They are to be selected through tests of both intelligence and character from among the soldiers – individuals who are unshakable in their conviction that their own well-being is intimately tied to that of the city. To ensure that members of the military and the ruling class retain the proper attitude towards their civic duties, members of both classes must lead a communal life without private homes, families, or property. When Socrates’ interlocutors object that such a life is not apt to make these citizens happy, the topic of happiness is addressed for the first time, but Socrates quickly brushes it aside at this point on the ground that the political order is designed to make the entire city happy, rather than any one particular group (419a-e).

The division of functions that leads to the separation of the three classes for the purpose of achieving the social conditions for justice concludes the discussion of the social order (427d–434c). The peculiar manner in which Socrates further develops his explanation of the nature of justice can best be understood with reference to the upshot of this discussion. The catalogue of what in later tradition has been dubbed ‘the four cardinal Platonic virtues’ – wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice – is first presented without comment. Piety, as the text indicates, is nοt treated as a virtue; religious practices should, rather, be left to tradition and to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi on the ground that: “We have no knowledge of these things” (427b–c). The definition of justice is to be discovered by a process of elimination. If there are four virtues in the city, then justice must be the one that is left over after the other three have been identified. There is no proof offered that there are exactly four virtues in a state, nor that they are items that can be lifted up, singly, for inspection, like objects from a basket. Instead, Socrates points out the role they play in the maintenance of the social order. About wisdom ( sophia ) – the only purely intellectual virtue and the exclusive possession of the rulers – little more is said at this point than that it is ‘good council’ ( euboulia ) in decisions about the internal and external affairs of the city. Courage ( andreia ) is the soldiers’ specific virtue. Socrates takes some trouble explaining its nature because it is a mixture of belief ( doxa ) and steadfastness of character ( sôtêria ). It is compared to colorfast wool: Through thick and thin, the guardians must be dyed-in-the-wool adherents to the laws’ decrees about what is to be feared and what is to be faced with confidence. Moderation ( sôphrosunê ) is not an intellectual excellence either, but rather a combination of belief with a certain disposition to support order. It is a conviction ( doxa , 431e) shared by all classes about who should rule – a conviction based on a state of ‘order’ ( kosmos ), ‘consonance’ ( sumphônia ), and ‘harmony’ ( harmonia ). The state’s third class, then, has no specific virtue of its own. Finally, the identification of justice is due to the sudden insight on Socrates’ part that justice is the principle that has been at work all along in the founding of the model state – namely, that everyone is to “do their own thing and not meddle with that of another” (433a).

The promise to establish the isomorphic structure of the city and soul has not been forgotten. After the definition and assignment of the four virtues to the three classes of the city, the investigation turns to the role and function of the soul’s virtues. The soul is held to consist of three parts corresponding to the three classes in the city. The lengthy argument for the tri-partition of the soul into a rational ( logistikon ), a spirited ( thumoeides ), and an appetitive ( epithumêtikon ) part (434d–441c) can here be neither reproduced nor subjected to a critical evaluation. That Plato lets Socrates express reservations concerning the adequacy of his own procedure, despite his unusually circumspect way of justifying the division of the soul’s faculties, indicates that he regards it as an important innovation. Indeed, there is no indication of separate parts of the soul in any of the earlier dialogues; irrational desires have been attributed there to the influence of the body. In the Republic , by contrast, the soul itself becomes the source of the appetites and desires. The difference between the rational and the appetitive part is easily justified because the opposition between the decrees of reason and the various kinds of unreasonable desires is familiar to everyone. The existence of a third, a ‘spirited’ or courageous part – different from both reason and appetite – is harder to prove. But the phenomenon of moral indignation is treated as evidence for a psychic force that is reducible neither to reason nor to any of the appetites; it is rather an ally of reason in a well-ordered soul, a force opposed to the unruly appetites. This concludes the proof that there are three parts in the soul, corresponding to the three classes in the city – namely, the rational part representing the wisdom of the rulers, the spirited part, manifest in the courage of the soldiers, and the appetitive part that motivates the rest of the population in its quest for material gain.

The discussion of the division of the soul sets the stage for the final determination of the contrast between justice and injustice (441c-445e): There will be justice in the city if the members of all three classes mind their own business; similarly, in the individual soul, there will be justice if each part of the soul fulfills its own function properly. This presupposes that the soul’s two upper parts have been given the right kind of training and education in order to control the appetitive part. The three other virtues are then assigned to the respective parts of the soul. Courage is the excellence of the spirited part, wisdom belongs to the rational part, and moderation is the consent of all three parts about who should rule and who should obey. Justice turns out to be the overall unifying quality of the soul, for the just person not only refrains from meddling with what is not his externally but also harmonizes the three parts of the soul internally. While justice is order and harmony, injustice is its opposite: It is a rebellion of one part of the city or soul against the others, and it results in the inappropriate rule of their inferior parts. Justice and injustice in the soul are, then, analogous to health and illness in the body. This comparison suffices to bring the investigation to its desired result: If justice is health and harmony of the soul, then injustice must be disease and disorder. Hence, it is clear that justice is a good state of the soul that makes its possessor happy, and injustice is its opposite. As no one in his right mind would prefer to live with a ruined body, similarly no one would prefer to live with a diseased soul. In principle, the discussion of justice has, therefore, reached its promised goal already at the end of Book IV. Socrates has met Glaucon’s and Adeimantus’ challenge to prove that justice is a good, in and by itself, for the soul of its possessor, and that it is preferable to injustice.

That the Republic ’s discussion does not end here but occupies six more books is due most of all to several loose ends that need to be tied up. Apart from the fact that reason and order are to reign supreme, little has been said about the citizens’ way of life. This gap will be filled, at least in part, by the description of the communal life of the upper classes without private property and family in Book V. More importantly, nothing has been said about the rulers and their particular kind of knowledge. This is a crucial point because, as the definitions of the three ‘inferior’ virtues show, their quality is contingent on the rulers’ wisdom. Socrates addresses this problem with the provocative thesis (473c–d): “Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leaders genuinely and adequately philosophize ... cities will have no rest from evils, nor will the human race.” This thesis starts the discussion of the philosophers’ knowledge and of their upbringing and education, which will continue through Books VI and VII. Because they also introduce the special objects of the philosophers’ knowledge, these books provide the metaphysical underpinning of the entire conception of the good soul and the good state, for the ‘Form of the Good’ turns out to be the ultimate source of all being and knowledge. A short summary of the upshot of the educational program must suffice here. The future philosophers, both women and men, are selected from the group of guardians whose general cultural training they share. If they combine moral firmness with quickness of mind, they are subject to a rigorous curriculum of higher learning that will prepare them for the ascent from the world of the senses to the world of intelligence and truth, an ascent whose stages are summed up in the similes of the Sun, the Line, and the Cave (508a–518b). To achieve this ascent, the students have to undergo, first, a preparatory schooling of ten years’ duration in the ‘liberal arts’: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and theoretical harmonics (518c–531c). Afterwards, they are admitted to the training in the master-science of ‘dialectic’, a science that supposedly enables its possessor to deal in a systematic way with the objects of real knowledge – the Forms in general – and with the Form of the Good in particular – the principle of the goodness of all else (531c–535a). This study is to last for another five years. Successful candidates are then sent back into the Cave as administrators of ordinary political life for 15 years. At the age of fifty, the rulers are granted leave to pursue philosophy, but even that pursuit is interrupted by periods of service as overseers over the order of the state. This completes, in a nutshell, the description of the philosopher-kings’ and -queens’ education and activities (539d–541b).

Plato’s design of an autocratic rule by an aristocracy of the mind has received a lot of flak. But our assessment of his politics must here be limited to an assessment of the kind of happiness it supposedly provides. Regardless of whether or not we find plausible Plato’s assumption of an overall principle of the good as the basis of the political order, his model state has, at least in theory, the advantage that it guarantees both internal and external peace. That is no mean feat in a society where interstate and civil wars were a constant threat and often enough ended in the destruction of the entire city. In addition, the division of functions guarantees a high degree of efficiency if every citizen does what he/she is naturally suited to do. But what about the citizens’ needs beyond those for security and material goods? Are they to find their life’s fulfillment only in the pursuit of their jobs? Plato seems to think so when he characterizes each class by its specific kind of desire and its respective good (581c): The philosophers are lovers of wisdom ( philosophoi ), the soldiers lovers of honor ( philotimoi ), and the workers are lovers of material goods ( philochrêmatoi ). That human beings find, or at least try to find, satisfaction in the kinds of goods they cherish is a point that is further pursued in the depiction of the decay of the city and its ruling citizens, from the best (the aristocracy of the mind) down to the worst (the tyranny of lust) in Books VIII and IX. A discussion of the tenability of this explanation of political and psychological decadence will not be attempted here. It is supposed to show that all inferior forms of government of city and soul are doomed to fail because of the inherent tensions between the goods that the different citizens aim for.

Some brief comments on Plato’s conception of happiness are in order at this point. He clearly goes on the assumption that human beings are happy insofar as they achieve the goals they cherish. Though this notion seems to come close to the ‘preference satisfaction’ for all citizens that is nowadays regarded as the primary aim of every liberal state, Plato’s restriction of each class to one type of good must seem objectionable, most obviously in the case of the citizens of the third class who supposedly covet nothing but material goods. This ‘reductive’ view of their human nature militates not only against present-day intuitions – it should also militate against Plato’s own moral psychology, in that all human souls consist of three parts – a rational, a spirited, and an appetitive part – whose health and harmony constitute the soul’s and the state’s happiness. Why, then, reduce the third class to animal-like creatures with low appetites, as suggested by the comparison of the people to a strong beast that must be placated (493a–c)? This comparison is echoed later in the comparison of the soul to a multiform beast, where reason just barely controls the hydra-like heads of the appetites and manages to do so only thanks to the aid of a lion-like spirit (588c–590d). Is Plato thereby giving vent to anti-democratic sentiments, showing contempt for the rabble, as has often been claimed? He can at least be cleared of the suspicion that the workers are mere serfs of the upper classes because he explicitly grants them the free enjoyment of all the customary goods that he denies to the upper classes (419a): “Others own land, build fine big houses, acquire furnishings to go along with them, make their own private sacrifices to the gods, entertain guests, and also, of course, possess what you were talking about just now, gold and silver and all the things that are thought to belong to people who are blessedly happy.” ‘Appetite’ is clearly not confined to food, drink, and sex. But apart from the granting of material largesse, the members of the third class are quite neglected in Plato’s ideal city. Apparently, no education is provided for them, for there is no suggestion that they participate in the guardians’ musical and athletic training, and there is no mention that obedience to the rulers’ commands is not the only source of happiness for the third class. Plato seems to sidestep his own insight that all human beings have an immortal soul and have to take care of it as best they can, as he not only demands in the Phaedo but is going to confirm in a fanciful way in the Myth of Er at the end of Republic Book X.

The lifestyle designated for the upper classes also seems open to objections. The soldiers’ musical and physical training is strictly regimented; they must take satisfaction in obedience to the laws for the sake of preserving the city’s inner and outer peace, and in the deeds of valor in war. Theirs is an austere camp-life; not all of them will be selected for higher education. But even the philosophers’ lives leave a lot to be desired, and not only because they have to starve their common human appetites and devote many years to administrative duties back in the ‘Cave’. Their intellectual pursuits are also not altogether enviable, as a closer inspection would show. Not only do the philosophers have two jobs – in violation of the rule ‘one person – one function’ – in that they are responsible for both administrative work and philosophical thought. They are also not to enjoy open-ended research but are, rather, subject to a mental training that is explicitly designed to turn their minds away from the enjoyment of all worldly beauty in order to focus exclusively on the contemplation of the Forms. This is indicated by the injunctions concerning the study of astronomy and harmonics (529a–531d): The students are not to crane their necks to watch the beauty of the “embroidery in the heavens” but rather to concern themselves with the ideal motions of ideal moving bodies in a purely geometrical fashion, and they are not to listen to audible sounds, but to attend to the mathematics of harmonics. The universe is not treated as an admirable cosmos – with the explicit purpose of providing moral and intellectual support to the citizens – in the way Plato is going to explain in the Philebus , the Timaeus , and in the Laws . Given these limitations of the philosophers’ mental exercises in the Republic , the claim that their lives are 729 times more pleasant than the tyrants’ (IX 587e) seems like a gross exaggeration, even if they enjoy the pleasures of being filled with pure and unadulterated truths while everyone else enjoys only semblances of the really real (581e–588a).

For all the advances that the Republic represents in certain respects, Plato’s ideal city must seem to us far from ideal. The system resembles a well-oiled machine where everyone has their economic niche and function, but its machine-like character must seem repellent to us, given that no deviations are permitted from the prescribed pattern. If innovations are forbidden, no room is left for creativity and personal development. Plato seems to presuppose that the fulfillment of a person’s function is sufficient to secure her happiness, or at least that is suggested by the ‘functional’ argument that defeats Thrasymachus (352d–354a). It states that every object, animal, and person has a specific function or work ( ergon ). If it performs its function well, it does well: For a living thing, ‘doing well’ means ‘living well’ and living well is tantamount to ‘living happily’. Though Socrates’ refutation of Thrasymachus is found wanting as a proof of justice’s superiority, the ergon -argument is nowhere revoked. On the contrary, it is affirmed by the principle of ‘one person – one job’ that is the very basis of Plato’s ideal city. But the confinement of everyone’s activities to just one kind of work seems rather a narrow one in the case of the citizens of the third class, given that they are not permitted to engage in politics, even if it may be economically most efficient. These features suffice to make the ideal life in Plato’s city unattractive to us, not to speak of certain other features that have not been explored here, such as the communal life envisaged for the upper classes and the assignment of sexual partnerships by a lottery that is rigged for the purposes of eugenics. But the feature that must strike us as strangest about Plato’s depiction of his citizens’ lives is that he does not acknowledge the one factor that could throw a more favorable light on the life of the third class, the life of tailors, carpenters, doctors, architects, sailors, i.e., that they will take pride and joy in their own work and in what they produce, given that they each in their own way make valuable contributions to the community’s well-being, without which the city could not function. Plato does not seem to acknowledge this when he addresses them, rather ungraciously, as ‘money-lovers’, indicating that he regards material gain as the only motivating factor in their lives.

Have these deficiencies escaped Plato’s notice? Justified as this critique must seem, it should be pointed out that Plato is clearly not concerned with the conditions that would make his city attractive to all citizens. His aim is rather more limited: He wants to present a model and work out its essential features. The same explanation applies to his depiction of the city’s and its citizens’ decay in Books VIII and IX. Contrary to certain critics’ assumptions, Plato is not there trying to predict and explain the course of history. Rather, he wants to explain the generation and decay typical of each political system and the psychopathology of its leaders. Plato finds the basis of both in the specific values – be they honor, money, freedom, or lust – that are embedded in the constitutions of the different types of state. It is unlikely that Plato presupposes that there are, in reality, pure representatives of these types, though some historical states may have been better representatives of those types than others. But the question remains whether he had a notion of the fact that his black-and-white picture of civic life in the model-state disregards the claim of individuals to have their own aims and ends and not to be treated like automata, with no thoughts and wishes of their own. Though the Republic contains some suggestions that would mitigate this bleak picture, for the sake of balancing this picture, it is more fruitful to look at other works of Plato’s middle period that concentrate on and prioritize the conditions of the individual soul rather than focus on the demands of the community. These works are the Symposium and the Phaedrus , for though each dialogue should be studied as a unity of its own, it is also necessary to treat the different dialogues as part of a wider picture.

The Symposium and the Phaedrus are two dialogues that focus on the individual soul and pay no attention to communal life at all. Instead, they concentrate on self-preservation, self-improvement, and self-completion. The Symposium is often treated as a dialogue that predates the Republic , most of all because it mentions neither the immortality nor the tripartition of the soul. But its dramatic staging – the praise of Eros by a company of symposiasts – is not germane to the otherworldly and ascetic tendencies of the Gorgias and the Phaedo . In addition, Plato has good reasons for leaving aside a discussion of the soul’s separability from the body in the Symposium (a feature it shares with the much later Philebus ). He aims to show in the Symposium that love is an incentive, not only for all humans but for all other living beings as well. Contrary to all previous speakers, Socrates denies that Eros is a god because the gods are in a state of perfection. Love, by contrast, is a desire by needy creatures ( endeeis ) for the beautiful and the good (199c–201c). Socrates thereby corrects the previous speakers’ confusion of love itself with the beloved object. This important insight is presented not as Socrates’ own but as the upshot of a ‘lecture on the nature of love by the wise priestess Diotima’ (201d–212b): Eros is a powerful demon, a being between ( metaxu ) what is mortal and what is immortal, an ever needy hunter of the beautiful. Human beings share that demonic condition, for they are neither good nor bad but desire the good and the beautiful, the possession of which would constitute happiness for them. Because all people want happiness, they pursue the good as well as they can (205a–206b). In each case, they desire the particular kinds of objects that they hope will fulfill their needs. Such fulfillment is not a passive possession; it is, rather, the appropriation of the objects of love that are deemed to be essential in the struggle for self-preservation, self-completion, and self-fulfillment (207d): “For among animals the principle is the same as with us, and mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it leaves behind a new young one in place of the old.” There is, then, a constant need for self-restoration and self-improvement by procreation in the quest for an ‘earthly immortality’ manifest in all living things (206e et pass .). This need is explained by Diotima with an impressive depiction of the constant flux that all organisms undergo, which, in the case of human beings, not only affects their physical constitution but their moral and intellectual condition as well. Without constant replenishment, none of them even stays the same over time (207c-208b).

In the case of human beings, these needs express themselves in different ways. The search for ‘self-eternalization’ may result in, or even be fulfilled by, the production of biological children or of so-called ‘children of the mind’ (e.g., works of art), or even by the creation of order in the city that is then guided by the virtues of justice and moderation (209a–e). Diotima’s lecture is finally crowned by a depiction of the famous scala amoris – the explanation of the refinement and sublimation that a person experiences when recognizing higher and higher kinds of beauty (210a–212a). Starting with the love of one beautiful body, the individual gradually learns to appreciate not only all physical beauty but also the beauty of the mind, and in the end, she gets a glimpse of the supreme kind of beauty; namely, the vision of the Form of the Beautiful itself – a beauty that is neither relative, nor changeable, nor a matter of degree.

Because beauty of the higher kind is tied to virtue and is attained by the comprehension of what is common in laws and public institutions, it is clear that Plato does not have purely aesthetic values in mind but the principles of good order that are ultimately tied to the Form of the Beautiful/Good. The difference between the Republic ’s and the Symposium ’s accounts lies in the fact that the scala amoris treats physical beauty as an incentive to the higher and better, an incentive that, in principle, affects every human being. There is no talk of a painful liberation from the bonds of the senses or of a turn-around of the entire soul that is reserved only for the better educated. Brief as the Symposium ’s explanation of happiness is, it shows three things: First, all human beings aim for their own self-preservation and -perfection. Second, this drive finds its expression in the products of their work, in creativity. Third, their respective activities are instigated by each person’s own particular desire for the beautiful. There is no indication that individuals must act as part of a community. Though the communitarian aspect of the good and beautiful comes to the fore in the high praise of the products of the legendary legislators (209e–210a), the ultimate assent to the Beautiful itself is up to the individual. That message of the Symposium is not unique in Plato’s works. The Lysis shares its basic assumption concerning the intermediary state of human nature between good and bad, and it regards need ( endeia ) as the basis of friendship. Due to the aporetic character of that dialogue, its lesson remains somewhat obscure, but it is obvious enough that it shares the Symposium’s general anthropological presuppositions.

The idea that eros is the incentive to sublimation and self-completion is further pursued in the Phaedrus . Although the close relationship between the two dialogues is generally acknowledged, the Phaedrus is commonly regarded as a much later work. Not only does it accept the Republic’s psychological doctrine of a tri-partite soul, it also advocates the immortality of the soul – doctrines that are conspicuously absent in the Symposium . But this difference seems due to a difference in perspective rather than to a change of mind. The discussion in the Symposium is deliberately confined to the conditions of self-immortalization in this life, while the Phaedrus takes the discussion beyond the confines of this life. If it shares the Republic’s doctrine of a division of the soul into three parts, it does so for reasons of its own: The three parts of the soul in the Phaedrus are not supposed to justify the separation of people into three classes. They explain, rather, the different routes taken by individuals in their search for beauty and their levels of success. If the Phaedrus goes beyond the Symposium , it does so in order to show how the enchantment by beauty can be combined with an element of Plato’s philosophy that seems quite alien to the notions of self-improvement and sublimation through the love of beauty. That element is abruptly identified as dialectic , the systematic method of collection and division that is characteristic of Plato’s later work. At first sight, it might seem that the dialogue’s topic, Eros, is hardly the right tie to keep together the dialogue’s two disparate parts – i.e., the highly poetical depiction of the enchantment by beauty and the ensuing heavenly voyage to a hyperouraneous place, and Plato’s subsequent, quite pedestrian, methodological explanations of the presuppositions of rhetoric (249b–c). But although the coherence of the Phaedrus cannot be argued for in full here, the notion that the Phaedrus is disjointed does not do justice to the dialogue’s careful composition and overall aim.

Rhetoric, its purpose and value, is, in fact, the dialogue’s topic right from the start. The misuse of rhetoric is exemplified by the speech attributed to the orator Lysias, a somewhat contrived plea to favor a non-lover rather than a lover. Socrates’ retort points up Lysias’ presuppositions: that love is a kind of sickness, an irrational craving for the pleasures of the body; that a lover tries to dominate and enslave the beloved physically, materially and mentally; and, most importantly, that the lover tries to deprive the beloved of philosophy. Once restored to his senses, the lover will shun his former beloved and break all his promises. This one-sided view of Eros is corrected in Socrates’ second speech: Eros, properly understood, is not a diseased state of mind but a kind of ‘divine madness’ ( theia mania ). To explain the nature of this madness, Socrates employs the comparison of the tripartite soul to a charioteer with a pair of winged horses, an obedient white one and an unruly black one. The crucial difference between the Phaedrus ’ tripartition and that in the Republic lies in this: Instead of a long and arduous liberation through education, the Phaedrus envisages a liberation through the uplifting force of love, a love that is – just as it is in the Symposium – instigated by physical beauty. That is what first makes the soul grow wings and soar in the pursuit of a corresponding deity, to the point where it will attain godlike insights. The best-conditioned souls – those where the charioteer has full control over his horses – get a glimpse of true being, including the nature of the virtues and of the good (247c–e). Depending on the quality of each soul, the quality of the beauty pursued will also determine the cycle of reincarnations that is in store for each soul after death (248c–249c).

What is remarkable in the Phaedrus ’ depiction of the uplifting effect of beauty is not only its exuberant tone and imagery, which goes far beyond the Symposium’s unadorned scala amoris , but also its intricate interweaving of mythical and philosophical elements. For, in the midst of his fanciful depiction of the different fates that are in store for different kinds of souls, Plato specifies, in quite technical terms, that the capacity “to understand speech in terms of general Forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity” (249b–c: synienai kat ’ eidos legomenon, ...eis hen logismôi synairoumenon ), is the condition for the reincarnation of individual souls as human beings. It is this capacity for abstract thought that he then calls “recollection of what the soul saw when it was travelling with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real instead.” The heavenly adventure now seems to amount to no more than the employment of the dialectical method that Socrates is going to describe, without further mythical camouflage, in the dialogue’s second part. The ability to work out a taxonomy, establishing the unity in a given subject-matter and dividing it up according to its natural kinds, is the art that characterizes the ‘scientific rhetorician’ (265d–266b). Socrates professes the greatest veneration for such a master: “If I believe that someone is capable of discerning a single thing that is also by nature capable of encompassing many, I follow ‘straight behind, in his tracks, as if he were a god’.” So the heavenly voyage has a quite down-to-earth counterpart in the dialectical method – a method that Plato regards as a ‘gift of the gods’, as he is going to confirm in the Philebus (16c). At the same time, Plato’s esteem for taxonomy explains the inner unity of the Phaedrus ’ seemingly incongruous two parts as two sides of one coin, and it also shows why Plato no longer treats the sensory as a mere distraction and disturbance of the mind. Instead, the properly conditioned souls’ sensory impressions are its first incentives to seek the higher and better.

What concept of happiness is suggested by this ‘divinely inspired’ view of human life? Individuals do not, here, find their fulfillment in peaceful interactions in a harmonious community. Instead, life is spent in the perennial pursuit of the higher and better. But, in that task, the individual is not alone; she shares it with kindred spirits. The message of both the Symposium and the Phaedrus is, therefore, two-pronged. On the one hand, there is no permanent attainment of happiness as a stable state of completion in this life. In the ups and downs of life (and of the afterlife), humans are in constant need of beauty as an incentive to aim for self-perfection. Humans are neither god-like nor wise; at best, they are god-lovers and philosophers, demonic hunters for truth and goodness. To know is not to have, and to have once is not to have forever. In the Symposium , Diotima states in no uncertain terms that humans have a perennial need to replenish what they constantly lose, both in body and soul, because they are mortal and changeable creatures, and the Phaedrus confirms the need for continued efforts because the heavenly voyage is not a one-time affair. On the other hand, there is also the message conveyed that the pursuit of the good and the beautiful is not a lonely enterprise. As indicated in the Symposium and further elaborated in the Phaedrus , love for a beautiful human being is an incentive to search for a higher form of life, a sacred joint journey of two friends in communion (255a–256e). The need for, and also the possibility of, constant self-repletion and -perfection is a motive that will reappear in the ethical thought of Plato’s late works, a motif he sometimes presents as the maxim that humans should aim at the ‘likening of oneself to god’ ( homoiôsis theôi in Theaetetus 176b; Timaeus 90c).

Sober philosophers have a tendency to ignore such visionary talk as a kind of Schwärmerei that lacks the substance to be worth serious thought. That Plato, appearances notwithstanding, is not indulging in a god-besotted rêverie in the Phaedrus is indicated by his interweaving of the mythical depiction in the dialogue’s first part with his specification and exploration of the dialectical method in the later part (259e-279c), where Socrates attempts to determine the requirements of ‘scientific rhetoric’ (259e–279c). Artful speaking, as well as artful deception, presupposes knowledge of the truth, especially where the identity of the phenomena is difficult to grasp, because similarities can be misleading. This applies in particular to concepts like the good and the just, as witnessed by the wide disagreement about their nature (263a–c). The development of the ‘sharp eye’ that is needed to assign each object to the right class is the aim of Plato’s method of collection and division, a method on which he expounds at some length in the Phaedrus . He discusses the care that is needed in order to “see together things that are scattered about everywhere, and to collect them into one kind ( mia idea )”, as well as “to cut the unity up again according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do (265d–e).” That this method is supposed to serve an overall ethical purpose is confirmed by the fact that rhetoric based on truth must reflect the speaker’s knowledge not only of the different types of souls and the types of speech that fit them (271d) but also of the truth about just and good things (272d).

That dialectic is geared to this end is somewhat obscured in the subsequent discussion in the Phaedrus . First of all, Plato turns away from this issue in his long depiction of the iniquities of contemporary rhetoricians when he contrasts their efforts with that of the scientific rhetorician. And Plato continues this excursion with a discussion of speaking and writing, culminating in his famous ‘critique of writing’. Second, although Plato makes ample use of the method of collection and division in later dialogues such as the Sophist and the Statesman , he seems to pay little heed there to problems of ethics, with the exception of the Philebus . But the aptness of the dialectical method in discerning the nature of the good has already been emphasized in the Republic (534b–c): “Unless someone can distinguish in an account the Form of the Good from everything else, can survive all refutation as if in battle... you will say that he does not know the good itself or any other good.” Brief as these remarks are, they show that the application of dialectic is of central importance to the understanding and pursuit of the good. That the good is nowhere subjected to such treatment must be due to the enormity of the task involved in undertaking a systematic identification of all that is good and in working out the criteria of distinction. Although it is unclear whether Plato in the Republic had already refined the dialectical method in the systematic way indicated in the Phaedrus , the hints contained about a ‘longer way’ (435d; 504b) to determine the nature of justice and that of the other virtues suggest that the development of a systematic method of collection and division was at least ‘in the works’. As a closer look at the much later Philebus will show, the determination of what is good about each kind of thing presupposes more than a classification by collection and division: the internal structure of each kind of entity has also to be determined. Knowledge is not confined to the comprehension of the objects’ being, identity, difference and other interrelations that exist in a given field. It also presupposes the knowledge of what constitutes the objects’ internal unity and complexity. It would, of course, be rather presumptuous to claim that Plato had not seen the need to investigate the ontological ‘anatomy’, as well as the taxonomy, of the Forms from early on. But as the late dialogues show, it took him quite some effort to develop the requisite conceptual tools for such analyses.

Before we turn to the late dialogues, a final review is in order of the kind of good life that Plato envisages in the dialogues under discussion here. In the Symposium , the emphasis is on the individual’s creative work, which involves others at least as catalysts in one’s efforts to attain self-perpetuation and self-perfection. The quality of life attainable by each person differs depending on the kind of ‘work’ each individual is able to produce. This is what the scala amoris is all about. In the Phaedrus , the emphasis is on the ‘joint venture’ of two kindred souls. True friends will get to the highest point of self-fulfillment through the joint insights that they attain. Just as in the Symposium , the philosophical life is deemed the best. But then, this preference is found everywhere in Plato, and it is not unique to him: All ancient philosophers regard their own occupation as the true fulfillment of human nature – as they saw it. If there are differences between them, they concern the kinds of study and occupation that they deemed appropriate for the philosopher. The more individualistic view of happiness espoused in the Symposium and in the Phaedrus need, however, not be seen as a later stage in Plato’s development than the Republic’s communitarian conception. They may present complementary, rather than rival, points of view, and no fixed chronology need be assumed in order to accommodate both.

4. The late dialogues: Ethics and Cosmology

4.1 harmony and cosmic goodness.

Most modern readers of Plato tend to ignore the significance of Plato’s late dialogues for his ethical views, for late dialogues such as the Timaeus appear to concentrate on nature and metaphysics — and, for the most part, drop questions such as the nature of the virtues and the moral psychology of the soul. This appears to be a shift in emphasis since nature and natural things are not among the objects that concern Plato in his earlier and middle philosophical investigations. Thus, in the Republic , he dismisses the study of the visible heaven from the curriculum of higher learning, along with the study of audible music. But, such generalizations about Plato’s intentions may be misleading. What he denigrates is not the study of the heavenly order as such or that of harmonics; it is, rather, the extent to which humans must necessarily rely on their eyes and ears in those concerns. Students of philosophy are, rather, encouraged to work out the true intelligible order underlying the visible heaven and audible music. Not only that: The ascent out of the Cave does include recognition of objects outside, especially “the things in the sky” ( R. 516a–b). If Plato is critical of natural science, it is because of its empirical approach. This echoes the Phaedo ’s complaint that one ruins one’s eyes by looking directly at things, most of all at the sun ( Phdo . 99d–e), while ignoring the ‘binding force’ of the good. But what kind of ‘binding force’ does Plato attribute to ‘the Good’? His reticence about this concept, despite its centrality in his metaphysics and ethics, is largely responsible for the obscurity of his concept of happiness and of what it is to lead a good life. The philosophers’ knowledge supposedly provides a solid basis for the good life of the entire community, as well as for that of the – perhaps uncomprehending – majority, because all benefit from the good order of the state. But what is ‘the Good’ that is responsible for the goodness of all other things? A lot of ink has been spilt over the following passage in Republic book VI, 509b: “Not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their being ( ousia ) is also due to it, although the Good is not being, but beyond it ( epekeina ) in rank and power.” The analogy with the sun’s maintenance of all that is alive suggests that the Good is the intelligent inner principle that determines the nature of every object that is capable of goodness, in the sense that these objects fulfill their respective functions in the appropriate way. Plato does not attempt to state how such a principle of goodness works in all things in the Republic , nor does he indicate whether he has in mind a unifying principle in a strong sense. That he is indeed thinking of an internal ‘binding force’ for all kinds of things is indicated, however, in Book X, in his elucidation of the ontological differences that exist, respectively, between the Forms as the products of a divine maker, their earthly copies, and the imitation of these copies by an artist ( R . 596a ff.). According to Plato, in each case, it is the use or function that determines what it is to be good (601d): “Aren’t the virtue or excellence, the beauty and correctness of each manufactured item, living creature, and action related to nothing but the use ( chreia ) for which each is made or naturally adapted?” Given that Plato does not limit this account to tools or instruments but explicitly includes living things and human actions, he seems to have a specific criterion in mind for what constitutes each thing’s excellence. But what determines the ‘use’ of a human being, and to what extent can there be a common principle that accounts for all good things? In the Republic , this question is answered only indirectly through the isomorphism of the just state and the just soul, based on a harmonious internal order. The postulate of such an orderly structure is not explicitly extended beyond the state and the soul. In the later dialogues, by contrast, the Good clearly operates on a cosmic scale. That such is Plato’s view comes to the fore in his excursus on the philosopher’s nature in the Theaetetus (173c–177c). Contrary to Socrates’ denial in the Apology , Socrates in the Theaetetus affirms that the philosopher is to pursue both “what lies below the earth and the heights above the heaven” (173e): “tracking down by every path the entire nature of each whole among the things that are.” And Socrates also concerns himself there with the question of “What is man? What actions and passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it from all other beings?” In that connection, he compares the discovery of truth with ‘likening oneself to God’ ( homoiôsis theôi ) and indicates that there is a unitary principle of goodness. The ability to achieve this superhuman state depends on one’s readiness to engage in strenuous philosophical discourse (177b).

If, in the Republic , the goodness of the individual soul is explained in terms of its being a smaller copy of a harmonious society, in the Timaeus , Plato goes for an even larger model. The universe and its soul now supply the ‘large text’ for deciphering the nature of the human soul. The structure of the world-soul is replicated in the nature of the human soul. That there is, nevertheless, a close affinity between the Republic and the cosmological project that Plato means to pursue in the Timaeus and its intended sequel is clearly indicated in the preface to the Timaeus . The tale of the origin of the universe, including human nature, is presented as the first step towards fulfilling Socrates’ wish to see his own best city ‘in action’ ( Ti . 19b–c). From antiquity on, this introduction has created the impression that the Timaeus is the direct continuation of the Republic , an impression that explains its juxtaposition in the Corpus Platonicum . Strong indications speak, however, for a much later date of the Timaeus . If Plato establishes a link between these two works, his intent is to compare as well as to contrast. The continuity consists solely in the fact that Socrates reaffirms his adherence to his ideal city’s order – at least in principle ( Ti . 17c–19b). It is this order that Critias promises to illustrate by a narration of the tale of two cities, of the war between pre-historic Athens, a city that exemplifies the ideal order, and Atlantis, a powerful tyrannical superpower ( Ti . 20d–26e). However, Plato never completed this project: The Critias breaks off after some 15 Stephanus-pages, in mid-sentence, and the third dialogue in the series, Hermocrates , whatever was to have been its content, was never written at all. So, the story of Socrates’ ideal city in action and of the life of its citizens remains untold. All we have is Plato’s cosmic model for such a state and the soul of its inhabitants (on Plato’s cosmology, see the entry Plato’s Timaeus by Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler in SEP ).

A crucial difference between the philosophical approach in the Republic and that in the Timaeus lies in the fact that, in the latter dialogue, Plato concerns himself with the structure of the visible heaven as a model for the human soul and also with the material conditions of human physiology. What is confined to mythology in Plato’s earlier works is here worked out – though not without a caveat to the effect that Plato is merely offering a likely story rather than a scientific explanation of the structure of the universe, of the human soul, and of human physiology. Plato’s choice of presenting his explanation of the order of the universe as a story of creation by a so-called demiurge or ‘divine workman’ is certainly no accident. It can be understood as a kind of ‘retractation’ of his deprecatory depiction of the divine workman’s heavenly embroidery in Republic VII 528e-530d, where such a product is depreciated because of its inferiority to a model conceivable in theory. To be sure, the Timaeus presupposes the Forms as the divine workman’s unchanging models, and he resorts to mathematical principles to explain the cosmic order (27d–29d; 30c–31b), but the focus is almost exclusively on the construction of the visible heavens. Plato now seems to have convinced himself that in order to explain the nature of a living being, it is necessary to show what factors constitute such a live organism.

This intention explains certain peculiarities of the Timaeus that make the dialogue hard to penetrate, for it falls into three rather disparate parts. The first part describes the structure of the world-soul and its replication in the human soul in a way that combines the general principles with those of mathematics and harmonics and illustrates it with fantastic imagery (29d–47e). The second part consists of a rather meticulous account of the elementary corporeal constituents of nature, which are supposedly formed out of geometrically constructed atoms (47e–69a). The third part combines elements from the first and second parts in a lengthy explanation of human physiology and psychology (69b–92c). The first, cosmological, part of the Timaeus greatly taxes one’s ability to relate the notion of a divinely created world-soul to the motions of the visible heavens because Plato offers only the barest hints concerning the intelligible, mathematical, and harmonic structure that is to explain these motions. By contrast, the explanations in the second and third parts are hard to follow because of Plato’s quite unique concern with the structure and the dynamics of the basic elements of the physical world in general and with that of human physiology in particular.

But why does Plato burden himself and his readers with such a complex machinery, and what does this heavenly instrument have to do with ethics? Since the human soul is formed out of the same ingredients as the world soul (albeit of a less pure kind) and displays the same structure (41d–e), Plato is clearly not just concerned with the order of the universe but with that of the human soul as well. He attributes to it the possession of the kinds of concepts that are necessary for the understanding of the nature of all things, both eternal and temporal. The soul’s ingredients are here limited to the purely general concepts and to mathematical proportions. There is no reference to a theory of recollection of the nature of all things. Rather, Plato is concerned to ascertain that the soul has all the tools for dealing with all objects: (1) the most important concepts necessary for the identification and the differentiations in the way required for dialectical procedure; (2) the numbers and proportions needed to understand numerical relations and harmonic structures of all sorts; (3) the capacity of the soul to perform and comprehend harmoniously coordinated motions. This, it seems, is all the soul needs and all it gets so that it can perform its various tasks. The unusual depiction of the soul’s elements and composition makes it hard, at first, to penetrate to the rationale of its construction, and it must remain an open question to what extent Plato expects his model to be taken in a literal rather than in a figurative sense. His overall message should be clear, however: The soul is a harmoniously structured entity that can, in principle, function forever, and it also comprehends the corresponding structures of other entities and, therefore, has access to all that is good and harmonious. This last point has consequences for his ethical thought that are not developed in the Timaeus itself, but that can be detected in some of the other late dialogues.

4.2 Measure for Measure

Plato’s concern with ‘right measure’ in a sense that is relevant for ethics is, of course, not confined to his late work. It shows up rather early. Already in the Gorgias , Socrates blames Callicles for the undisciplined state of his soul and attributes it to his neglect of geometry (508a): “You’ve failed to notice that proportionate equality ( geometrikê isotês ) has great power among both gods and men.” But it is unclear whether this expression is to be taken in a more than metaphorical sense; it is, at any rate, not repeated anywhere else in Plato’s earlier work. There is also no indication that Plato takes seriously the idea of a ‘quantification’ of the nature of the virtues in his middle dialogues. If mathematics looms large, then, it is as a model science on account of its exactness, the stability of its objects, and their accessibility to reason. A systematic exploration of the notion that measure and proportion are the fundamental conditions of goodness is confined to the late dialogues. Apart from the Timaeus ’ emphasis on a precise cosmic and mental order, there is a crucial passage in the Statesman (283d–285c), where the Eleatic Stranger distinguishes two kinds of ‘art of measurement’. The first kind is the ordinary measuring of quantities relative to each other (‘the great and small’). The second kind has a normative component: It is concerned with the determination of ‘due measure’ ( to metrion ). The latter is treated with great concern, for the Eleatic Stranger claims that it is the basis of all expertise, including statesmanship, the very art that is the subject of that dialogue (284a–b): “It is by preserving measure in this way that they produce all the good and fine things they do produce.” His point is that all good productions and all processes of generation that come to a good end presuppose ‘right measure’, while arbitrary quantities (‘the more and less’) have no such results. The Eleatic Stranger therefore suggests a separation of the simple arts of measuring from the arts concerned with due measure (284e): “Positing as one part all those sorts of expertise that measure the numbers, lengths, depths, breadths and speeds of things in relation to what is opposed to them, and as the other, all those that measure in relation to what is in due measure ( to metrion ), what is fitting ( to prepon ), the right moment ( to kairion ), what is as it ought to be ( to deon ) – everything that is removed from the extremes to the middle ( meson ).” This distinction finds no application in the Statesman itself, except that due measure must be presupposed in the final definition of the statesman as a ‘kingly weaver’, weaving together the fabric of the state by combining the aggressive and the moderate temperaments in the population so as to produce a harmonious citizenry (305e– 311c). But no mathematic procedure is specified as the condition of such a ‘mixing together of the citizens’ characters’ in due measure.

The importance of ‘measure’ in a seemingly literal sense is made explicit; however, in the Philebus , the dialogue that is concerned with the question of whether pleasure or knowledge is the state of mind that constitutes happiness. In that dialogue, number ( arithmos ), limit ( peras ), and measure ( metron ) play a crucial role at various points of the discussion, and the Philebus is also the dialogue where Plato requires that numerical precision must be observed in the application of the ‘divine gift’ of the dialectical procedure of collection and division (16c–17a). The dialectician must know precisely how many species and subspecies a certain genus contains; otherwise, he has no claim to any kind of expertise. Despite this emphasis on precision and on the need to determine the numerical ‘limit’ in every science, Socrates does not provide the envisaged kind of collection and division of pleasure and knowledge. He avoids that task with the pretense that he suddenly remembers that neither of the two contenders suffices in itself for the happy life and that a mixture of the two is preferable. To explain the nature of this mixture, Socrates introduces a fourfold division of all beings (23c–27c), a division that uses the categories of ‘limit’ and ‘measure’ in a different way than the one suggested earlier for the ‘divine method of dialectic’. Limit now concerns the objects’ internal structure. As Socrates states, all beings belong in one of four classes – namely (1) limit ( peras ), (2) the unlimited ( apeiron ), (3) the mixture ( meixis ) of limit and the unlimited, or (4) the cause ( aitia ) of such a mixture. As the subsequent explications concerning the four classes show, the unlimited comprises all those things that have no exact measure or grade in themselves, such as what is hotter and colder, faster and slower. Although at first the examples are confined to relative terms, the class of the unlimited is then extended to things like hot and cold, dry and moist, fast and slow, and even heat and frost, i.e., to all that has no fixed limit or degree. Mixture takes place when such qualities take on a definite quantity ( poson ) or due measure ( metrion ) that puts a definite limit on their variety. That only measured entities qualify as mixtures is not only suggested by the examples Socrates refers to (health, strength, beauty, music, and the seasons) but by his assertion, later in the dialogue, that a mixture without due measure or proportion does not deserve its name (64d–e): “it will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself. For there would be no blending in such cases at all but only an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be contained in it.” The upshot of this discussion is that all stable entities represent a harmonious equilibrium of their otherwise limitless ingredients. Since indeterminate elements usually turn up in pairs of opposites, the right limit in each case must be the right proportion necessary for their balance. In the case of health, there will be the right balance between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist. The cause of the proper proportion for each mixture turns out to be reason ; it is the only member of the fourth class. As Socrates indicates, divine reason is the ultimate source of all that is good and harmonious in the universe, while human reason constitutes order down here (26e–27c; 28a–30e).

The adoption of this fourfold ontology allows Socrates to assign pleasure and knowledge to two of the four classes of being: Pleasure turns out to be unlimited because it admits of the ‘more and less’. Reason, by contrast, belongs to the fourth class, to the causes of good mixtures. On the basis of this classification, Socrates provides the criteria for a critical assessment of the different kinds of pleasure and knowledge (31b–59d) and presents happiness as a mixture of all kinds of knowledge with true and pure kinds of pleasure (59d-64b). In a final ‘ranking of goods’, measure and due proportion, unsurprisingly, get the first rank among the possessions of the soul, things in proper proportion come in second, reason is ranked third, the arts and sciences obtain fourth place, whereas the true and pure pleasures get fifth and last place on the scale of goods (64c–67b). If Plato in the Philebus is more favorably disposed towards a hedonist stance than in some of his earlier works, he is so only to a quite limited degree: He regards pleasure as a necessary ingredient in human life because both the physical and the psychic equilibria that constitute human nature are unstable. In a sense that recalls the Symposium , Plato presupposes that there is always some deficiency or lack that needs supplementation. Because the range of such ‘supplements’ includes learning and the pursuit of the virtues, there are some pleasures that are rightly cherished. But even they are deemed goods only insofar as they are a compensation for human imperfection.

Given the importance of ‘measure’, there is the question of how serious Plato is about such a ‘mathematization’ of his principles, quite generally. Though harmony and order have been treated as important principles in Plato’s metaphysics and ethics from early on, in his late dialogues, he seems to envisage right measure in a literal sense. This explains his confidence that even physical entities can attain a relatively stable state. As he suggests both in the Timaeus and in the Philebus , not everything is in a constant flux. On the contrary, those things that possess the measures that are right for their type are stable entities and can be the objects of ‘firm and true beliefs and convictions’ ( Ti . 37b–c). This applies not only to the nature of the visible universe but also to the human body and mind. Plato seems to have felt encouraged to embrace such theories by the advances of astronomy and harmonics in his own lifetime so that he postulates ‘due proportion’ in an arithmetical sense as the cause of all harmony and stability.

Plato’s confidence seems to have extended not only to the physical but also to the moral state of human nature. That assumption is confirmed not only by the emphasis on right mixture in the Philebus but also by the discussion in the Laws about how the laws are to achieve peace in the state and harmony in the souls of the citizens. Plato no longer treats the emotions as a menace to the virtues; rather, he assigns to the legislators the task of providing for an adequate balance of pleasure and pain by habituating the citizens in the right way (632a–643a). This balance, through paideia , is crucial for maintaining a truly liberal soul (I 636e): “Pleasure and pain flow like two springs released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right spring at the right time, he lives a happy life.” Suffice it to note that the comments concerning the right measure of pleasure and pain form the preface to the entire project. That there is a considerable re-evaluation of the emotions in the Laws , compared to that in the Republic , is confirmed by the fact that, according to Laws II, education is supposed to provide the citizens with the right habituation ( ĕthos ) concerning the measure of pleasure and pain. The function assigned, there, to the right measure of pleasure and pain in the citizens’ sentimental education clearly anticipates the Aristotelian conception of the moral virtues as the right mean between excess and deficiency (II 653b–c): “Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.” The confidence expressed in the Laws in the power of due measure culminates in the famous maxim that God (rather than Protagoras’ Man) is the measure of all things (IV 716c–d): “In our view, it is God who is preeminently the ‘measure of all things’, much more so than any man, as they say. So if you want to recommend yourself to someone of this character, you must do your level best to make your own character reflect his, and on this principle the moderate man is God’s friend, being like him, whereas the immoderate and unjust man is not like him and is his enemy; and the same reasoning applies to the other vices too.” But because Plato, like Aristotle after him, carefully refrains from any kind of specifications of concrete right measures, we should treat the ‘arithmetic’ of the good life with a pinch of salt. That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is as clear to Plato as it is to Aristotle. This does not shake Plato’s faith in the Laws that right habituation through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will provide the necessary inner equilibrium in the soul of the good citizen.

Are Plato’s views of human nature and the human good more sympathetic to democratic standards in his last works? If we look at the requirements in the Timaeus concerning the good state of the human soul in ‘orderly circles’, Plato seems to remain as demanding and elitist as ever. But he no longer puts so much emphasis on the distance between the best and the ordinary. As he remarks in the Statesman , statesmen don’t stick out from the rest of humankind in mind and body like the queen-bees do in the hive (301d-e). Further, even the best of the souls of human beings are far inferior to the world-soul, because, in the case of human souls, their ‘incorporation’ means disorder that subsides only gradually ( Ti . 42e-44c). That this applies to all human beings suggests that Plato has become more democratic in the sense that he regards the ‘human herd’ as a more uniform flock than he did in his earlier days. He retains the conviction, however, that a well-ordered soul is the prerequisite of the good life and that human beings stand in need not only of a careful moral education but also of a well-regulated life. Whether a life in Plato’s nomocracy would better please modern minds than a life ruled by philosopher-kings is a question that would require a careful perusal of that enormous compendium of regulations and laws, which makes the task of reading and understanding the Laws very hard work. But that compendium is at the same time a valuable sourcebook for all those interested in Plato’s late moral thought (for a more detailed evaluation of the Laws , see the entry Plato on Utopia in SEP by Chris Bobonich and Katherine Meadows).

• account: logos
• appetitive part: épithumetikon
• art: technê
• being: ousia
• cause: aitia
• consonance: sumphonia
• courage: andreia
• difference: heteron
• education: paideia
• enthusiasm: enthusiasmos
• excellence: aretê
• form: eidos, idea
• function: ergon
• habit: ethos
• happiness: eudaimonia
• harmony: harmonia
• kind: eidos, idea
• justice: dikaiosunê
• likening to god: homoiôsis theô
• limit: peras
• love: erôs
• madness, divine: theia mania
• measure: metron ; metrion
• mixture: meixis
• model: paradeigma
• moderation: sôphrosunê
• need: endeia ; chreia
• number: arithmos
• order: kosmos
• perplexity: aporia
• quantity: poson
• rational part: logistikon
• reason: nous
• reasoning: logos
• recollection: anamnêsis
• refutation: elenchos
• sameness: tauton
• self-mastery: egkrateia
• self-sufficiency: autarkeia
• soul: psuchê
• sort: eidos, idea
• spirited part: thumoeides
• steadfastness: sôtêria
• unlimited: apeiron
• virtue: aretê
• weakness of the will: akrasia
• wisdom: sophia
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• Scott, D., 2015, Levels of Argument. A Comparative Study of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Bobonich, C. (ed.), 2010, Plato’s Laws. A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Calvo, T. and Brisson, L. (eds.), 1995, Interpreting the Timaeus and Critias , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Cornelli, G., Robinson, T., Bravo, F. (eds.), 2019, Plato’s Phaedo: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Symposium Platonicum , Baden-Baden: Academia Verlag.
• Destrée, P. and Giannopoulou, Z. (eds.), 2016, Cambridge Critical Guide to Plato’s Symposium , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Detel, W., Becker, A., and Scholz P. (eds.), 2003, Ideal and Culture of Knowledge in Plato , Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
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• Döring, K., Erler, M., Schorn, S. (eds.), 2003, Pseudoplatonica , Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
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• Erler, M. and Luc Brisson, 2007, Gorgias-Meno : Selected papers from the Seventh Symposium Platonicum (International Plato Studies: Volume 25), Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Fine, G. (ed.), 1999, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology , Plato 2.: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Hermann, F.-G. (ed.), 2006, New Essays on Plato , Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales.
• Irwin, T., 1995, Plato’s Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lisi, F. (ed.), 2001, Plato’s Laws and its Historical Significance , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• McPherran, M. (ed.), 2010, Plato’s Republic, A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mohr, R. and B. Sattler (eds.), 2010, One book, the whole universe: Plato’s Timaeus today , Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing.
• Moravcsik, J. M. E. & Temko, P. (eds.), 1982, Plato on Beauty, Wisdom and the Arts , Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Morrison, D. (ed.), 2012, The Cambridge Companion to Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Notomi,N and Brisson, L. (eds.), 2013, Dialogues on Plato’s Politeia: Selected Papers from the Ninth Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Pappas, N. (ed.), 2013, The Routledge Guidebook to Plato’s Republic. London: Routledge.
• Patterson, R., Karasmanis, V., Hermann, A. (eds.), 2012, Presocratics & Plato. Festschrift in Honor of Charles Kahn , Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing.
• Robinson, T. (ed.), 2000, Plato: Euthydemus, Lysis, Charmides: Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Rosetti, L. (ed.), 1992, Understanding the Phaedrus: Proceedings of the Second Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Rowe, C. (ed.), 1995, Reading the Statesman: Proceedings of the Third Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Santas, G. (ed.), 2006, The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic , Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Scolnicov, S. and Brisson, L. (eds.), 2003, Plato’s Laws. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Tulli, M. and Erler, M. (eds.), 2013, Plato in Symposium: Selected Papers from the Tenth Symposium Platonicum , Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag.
• Vlastos, G. (ed.), 1971, Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays (Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology , Volume 2: Ethics, Politics and Philosophy of Art and Religion ), Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
• Wagner, E. (ed.), 2001, Essays on Plato’s Psychology , Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books.
• Annas, J. & Rowe, C. (eds.), 2002, New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient , Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Brandwood, L., 1990, The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Keyser, P., 1991, “Review of Ledger” (1989), Bryn Mawr Classical Review , 2:, 422–7.
• –––, 1992, “Review of Brandwood” (1990), Bryn Mawr Classical Review , 3: 58–73.
• Ledger, G. R., 1989, Recounting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato’s Style , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Nails, P., 1992, “Platonic Chronology Reconsidered,” Bryn Mawr Classical Review , 3: 314–27.
• Ritter, C., 1888, Untersuchungen über Platon: Die Echtheit und Chronologie der Platonischen Schriften , Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
• Ryle, G., 1966, Plato’s Progress , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thessleff, H., 1982, Studies in Platonic Chronology , Helsinki; Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
• Young, C. M., 1994, “Plato and Computer Dating,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , 12: 227–50.

The earlier dialogues

• Allen, R., 1970, Plato’s Euthyphro and the Earlier Theory of Forms , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Broadie, S., 2021, Plato’s Sunlike Good , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Brickhouse, T. & Smith, N., 2004, Plato and the Trial of Socrates , London: Routledge.
• Ebert, T., 2018, Platon: Menon. Übersetzung und Kommentar , Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Frede, D., 1986, “The Impossibility of Perfection: Socrates’ Criticism of Simonides’ Poem in the Protagoras ,” Review of Metaphysics , 39: 729–753.
• Geach, P. T., 1966, “Plato’s Euthyphro : An Analysis and Commentary,” Monist , 50: 369–82.
• Irani, T., 2019, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of the Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Irwin, T. (trans.), 1979, Plato : Gorgias, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kraut, R., 1984, Socrates and the State , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1986, “Coercion and Objectivity in Plato’s Dialectic,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie , 40: 49–74.
• Nehamas, A., 1999a, “Socratic Intellectualism,” reprinted in Nehamas 1999, Ch. 2.
• Penner, T., 1973, “The Unity of Virtue,” Philosophical Review , 82: 35–68.
• Penner, T. & Rowe, C., 2005, Plato’s Lysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Robinson, R., 1953, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Roochnik, D. L., 1986, “Plato’s use of the techne-analogy” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 24: 295–310.
• Santas, G., 1979, Socrates: Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Scott, D., 2006, Plato’s Meno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stokes, M., 1986, Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 2005, Dialectic in Action. An Examination of Plato’s Crito, Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales.
• Taylor, C. C. W. (trans.), 1976, Plato’s Protagoras, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
• Vlastos, G., 1991, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1994, Socratic Studies , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1994a “The Socratic Elenchus: Method is All,” in Vlastos 1994, 1–28.
• Weiss, R., 2001, Virtue in the Cave: moral inquiries in Plato’s Meno, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The middle dialogues

• Annas, J., 1976, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy , 51: 307–21.
• –––, 1981, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Barker, A. & Warner M. (eds.), 1992, The Language of the Cave , Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing.
• Barney, R., 2010, “Plato on Desire for the Good,” in Desire, Good, and Practical Reason , ed. Sergio Tenenbaum, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Brown, E., 2012, “The Unity of the Soul in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato and the Divided Self , eds. Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 53–73.
• Burnyeat, M. F., 2006, “The Truth of Tripartition,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 106: 1–22.
• Cooper, J. M., 1999, Reason and Emotion. Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1999a, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” in Cooper 1999, ch. 5.
• –––, 1999b, “The Psychology of Justice in Plato,” in Cooper 1999, ch. 4.
• Cross, R. C. & Woozley, A. D., 1964, Plato’s Republic: A Philosophical Commentary , London: Macmillan.
• Ferrari, G., 2005, City and Soul in Plato’s Republic. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hunter, R., 2004, Plato’s Symposium , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kamtekar, R., 2017, Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul, and the Desire for Good , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Klosko, G., 1986, The Development of Plato’s Political Thought , New York: Methuen.
• Lesher, J. & Nails, D, and Sheffield, F. (eds.), 2006, Plato’s Symposium: issues of interpretation and reception , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Morrison, D., 2001, “The Happiness of the City and the Happiness of the Individual in Plato’s Republic ,” Ancient Philosophy , 21: 1–24.
• Moss, J., 2006, “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 72(3): 503–35.
• Ober, J., 1998, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Reeve, D.C.D., 1988, Philosopher Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• ––– 2013, Blindness and Reorientation: Problems in Plato’s Republic , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Robinson, R., 1971, “Plato’s separation of reason and desire,” Phronesis , 16: 38–48.
• Sachs, D., 1971, “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic ,” repr. in Vlastos 1971 (Volume 1), ch. 2.
• Santas, G., 1985, “Two theories of the good in Plato’s Republic ,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 57: 223–45.
• Sheffield, F., 2006, Plato’s Symposium. The Ethics of Desire , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Schofield, M., 1999, Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and other Classical Paradigms , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Singpurwalla, R., 2019, “Plato and the Tripartition of the Soul,” in J. Sisko (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in Antiquity ( History of Philosophy of Mind , Volume 1), London: Routledge, 101–119.
• White, N., 1979, A Companion to Plato’s Republic , Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Williams, B.A.O., 1973, “The Analogy of city and soul in Plato’s Republic ,” in E.N Lee, A.P.D. Mourelatos and R.M. Rorty (eds.), Exeqesis and Argument ( Phronesis Supplementary Volume 1 , Chapter 10); reprinted in G. Fine (ed.), Plato (Volume 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion and Soul), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

The later dialogues

• Bobonich, C., 2002, Plato’s Utopia recast: his later ethics and politics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Broadie, S., 2012, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012
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• Carone, G., 2005, Plato’s Cosmology and Its Ethical Dimensions , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cherniss, H., 1957, “The Relation of the Timaeus to Plato’s Later Dialogues,” American Journal of Philology , 78: 225–66.
• Cooper, J. M., 1999c, “Plato’s Statesman and Politics,” in Cooper 1999, ch. 7.
• Cornford, F. M., 1937, Plato’s Cosmology , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Delcomminette, S., 2006, Le Philèbe de Platon: Introduction a L’agathologie platonicienne , Leiden: Brill
• Dorter, K., 1994, Form and Good in Plato’s Eleatic Dialogues , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Ferrari, G., 1987, Listening to the Cicadas: a study of Plato’s Phaedrus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1992, “Platonic Love,” in Kraut (ed.), 1992, ch. 8.
• Frede, D. (trans.), 1993, Plato Philebus (with introduction and notes by the translator), Indianapolis: Hackett.
• –––, 1992, “Disintegration and restoration: Pleasure and Pain in the Philebus ,” in R. Kraut (ed.) 1992, 425–63.
• –––, 1997, Platon Philebos: Übersetzung und Kommentar , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
• Gregory, A., 2000, Plato’s Philosophy of Science , London: Duckworth.
• Griswold, C. L., 1986, Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Johansen, T., 2006, Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• World Biography

Plato Biography

Born: c. 427 B.C.E. Athens, Greece Died: c. 347 B.C.E. Athens, Greece Greek philosopher

Plato was born in Athens, Greece, the son of Ariston and Perictione, both of Athenian noble backgrounds. He lived his whole life in Athens, although he traveled to Sicily and southern Italy on several occasions. One story says he traveled to Egypt. Little is known of his early years, but he was given the finest education Athens had to offer noble families, and he devoted his considerable talents to politics and the writing of tragedy (works that end with death and sadness) and other forms of poetry. His acquaintance with Socrates (c. 469–c. 399 B.C.E. ) altered the course of his life. The power that Socrates's methods and arguments had over the minds of the youth of Athens gripped Plato as firmly as it did many others, and he became a close associate of Socrates.

The end of the Peloponnesian War (431–04 B.C.E. ), which caused the destruction of Athens by the Spartans, left Plato in a terrible position. His uncle, Critias (c. 480–403 B.C.E. ), was the leader of the Thirty Tyrants (a group of ruthless Athenian rulers) who were installed in power by the victorious Spartans. One means of holding onto power was to connect as many Athenians as possible with terrible acts committed during the war. Thus Socrates, as we learn in Plato's Apology, was ordered to arrest a man and bring him to Athens from Salamis for execution (to be put to death). When the great teacher refused, his life was threatened, and he was probably saved only by the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants and the reestablishment of the democracy (a system of government in which government officials are elected by the people).

Death of Socrates

Plato welcomed the restoration of the democracy, but his mistrust was deepened some four years later when Socrates was tried on false charges and sentenced to death. Plato was present at the trial, as we learn in the Apology, but was not present when the hemlock (poison) was given to his master, although he describes the scene in clear and touching detail in the Phaedo. He then turned in disgust from Athenian politics and never took an active part in government, although through friends he did try to influence the course of political life in the Sicilian city of Syracuse.

Plato and several of his friends withdrew from Athens for a short time after Socrates's death and remained with Euclides (c. 450–373 B.C.E. ) in Megara. His productive years were highlighted by three voyages to Sicily, and his writings, all of which have survived.

The first trip, to southern Italy and Syracuse, took place in 388 and 387 B.C.E. , when Plato met Dionysius I (c. 430–367 B.C.E. ). Dionysius was then at the height of his power in Sicily for having freed the Greeks there from the threat of Carthaginian rule. Plato became better friends with the philosopher Dion (c. 408–353 B.C.E. ), however, and Dionysius grew jealous and began to treat Plato harshly.

His dialogues

When Plato returned to Athens, he began to teach in the Gymnasium Academe and soon afterward acquired property nearby and founded his famous Academy, which survived until the early sixth century C.E. At the center of the Academy stood a shrine to the Muses (gods of the arts), and at least one modern scholar suggests that the Academy may have been a type of religious brotherhood.

Plato had begun to write the dialogues (writings in the form of conversation), which came to be the basis of his philosophical (having to do with the search for knowledge and truth) teachings, some years before the founding of the Academy. To this early period Plato wrote the Laches which deals with courage, Charmides with common sense, Euthyphro with piety (religious dedication), Lysis with friendship, Protagoras with the teaching of virtues, or goodness, and many others. The Apology and Crito stand somewhat apart from the other works of this group in that they deal with historical events, Socrates's trial and the period between his conviction and execution.

Plato's own great contributions begin to appear in the second group of writings, which date from the period between his first and second voyages to Sicily. The Meno carries on the question of the teachability of virtue first dealt with in Protagoras and introduces the teaching of anamnesis (recollection), which plays an important role in Plato's view of the human's ability to learn the truth.

The Republic

Socrates is again the main character in the Republic, although this work is less a dialogue than a long discussion by Socrates of justice and what it means to the individual and the city-state (independent states). Just as there are three elements to the soul, the rational, the less rational, and the impulsive irrational, so there are three classes in the state, the rulers, the guardians, and the workers. The rulers are not a family of rulers but are made up of those who have emerged from the population as a whole as the most gifted intellectually. The guardians serve society by keeping order and by handling the practical matters of government, including fighting wars, while the workers perform the labor necessary to keep the whole running smoothly. Thus the most rational elements of the city-state guide it and see that all in it are given an education equal to their abilities.

Only when the three work in harmony, with intelligence clearly in control, does the individual or state achieve the happiness and fulfillment of which it is capable. The Republic ends with the great myth of Er, in which the wanderings of the soul through births and rebirths are retold. One may be freed from the cycle after a time through lives of greater and greater spiritual and intellectual purity.

Plato's third and final voyage to Syracuse was made some time before 357 B.C.E. , and he tried for the second time to influence the young Dionysius II. Plato was unsuccessful and was held in semicaptivity before being released. Plato's Seventh Letter, the only one in the collection of thirteen considered accurate, perhaps even from the hand of Plato himself, recounts his role in the events surrounding the death of Dion, who in 357 B.C.E. entered Syracuse and overthrew Dionysius. It is of more interest, however, for Plato's statement that the deepest truths may not be communicated.

Plato died in 347 B.C.E. the founder of an important philosophical school, which existed for almost one thousand years, and the most brilliant of Socrates's many pupils and followers. His system attracted many followers in the centuries after his death and resurfaced as Neoplatonism, the great rival of early Christianity.

For More Information

Kahn, Charles H. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Shorey, Paul. What Plato Said. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933.

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Plato of Athens: a life in philosophy

Stephen halliwell , university of st. andrews. [email protected].

Robin Waterfield has established himself, over a period of several decades, as the world’s leading anglophone translator of ancient Greek prose literature. In a remarkable body of work (approaching some thirty volumes), he has produced characteristically fluent and stylish versions of such authors as Herodotus (complete), Xenophon ( Anabasis and the Socratica), Aristotle ( Physics and Rhetoric ), Demosthenes, Polybius, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. But at the heart of his output have been the dialogues of Plato, of which he has translated sixteen to date, including Republic , Symposium , Theaetetus , and Timaeus . [1] He has also published several trade books on topics in Greco-Roman history, so he is highly experienced at writing for a general audience, the explicit target of the present work. In Plato of Athens Waterfield even anticipates readers who may not have sampled any of Plato’s own writing (94), and he is mostly very careful to take nothing for granted historically or philosophically; his light footnotes cite primary sources but contain only very occasional references to secondary literature (though a fifteen-page bibliography is supplied, surely overkill for novices). He certainly writes with a clarity and eloquence which will make his book engaging for non-specialists. [2] But does the aim of writing for such an audience justify Waterfield’s willingness to talk in terms of a ‘biography’ of Plato, when he knows full well the scarcity and shortcomings of the evidence available for such an undertaking? In a way, yes, since the book does not purport to be a rigorous reappraisal of the evidence for Plato’s life but, instead, one kind of ‘introduction to [Plato’s] work’ (x). Even so, Plato of Athens prompts some difficult questions about what it means, or might mean, to think about Plato biographically.

Waterfield alerts his readers to the central challenge facing his project in the very first sentence of his Preface: ‘The prospect of writing a biography of Plato is daunting, and many have judged it a lost cause’ (ix). Having indicated, as already mentioned, that he intends his book to serve also as an introduction to Plato’s work, he adds, somewhat defensively, ‘This is not a book about Plato’s philosophy but about Plato’ (x). What this awkward conjunction of intentions partly conveys is modesty on Waterfield’s part: his book does not pretend to offer philosophically probing or innovative readings of the dialogues; he calls his overall approach, in this same context, ‘fairly conservative’. But the tension I have noted also highlights the strangeness of aspiring to separate the ‘work’ from the ‘philosophy’, betraying some unease about how to construct the biography of a figure whose life’s work was (or so one might suppose) nothing but philosophy, as the book’s own subtitle acknowledges.

Waterfield’s strategy for dealing with the cluster of problems attaching to the idea of a biography of Plato has three main strands, all of them broached in a preliminary section on ‘The Sources’. First, from the copious ancient stock of biographical anecdotes about Plato he sifts out – often by mere intuition and with a resilient faith that even late sources preserve an older ‘tradition’ (xxviii) – details which strike him as plausible, or just appealingly colourful, sometimes not troubling to tell the reader that particular stories (‘It is said …’, ‘We are told …’) are attested only centuries after Plato’s lifetime. Secondly, he accepts the authenticity of the Seventh Letter (as well as the third and eighth letters), not just as a source of information about Plato’s Sicilian visits but also as a unique window on Plato’s mind and character; his minimal defence of authenticity, however, lapses into a priori gestures (‘No forger …’, ‘impossible for a forger …’). Thirdly, and crucially, he overrides the ostensible absence of Plato’s voice from his own dialogues by treating them as fundamentally doctrinal works (asserted on the first page of the Introduction, xxi, and, with occasional equivocation, throughout), a premise which enables him to convert their distilled philosophical content into, so to speak, a silent self-portrait of ‘the man’ though not of his ‘life and character’ (xxxix, another uncomfortable distinction). Plato, he says at one point, is ‘not silent’ after all, but a ‘ventriloquist’ (85). Waterfield could, one assumes, go further than he is able to do here in buttressing his principles of interpretation and in addressing objections to them: acceptance of the Seventh Letter, for one thing, does not sit entirely easily with a doctrinal reading of the dialogues. But he himself refers, more than once, to ‘risk’: it is a risk, au fond , of slipping into historical fiction.

The main body of the book consists of eight chapters. The first three cover what we might call Plato’s formation. Chapter 1, which accepts a birth date of 424-3 (following Deborah Nails’ The People of Plato , rightly called ‘indispensable’, xi, but not cited for individual details), treats Plato’s family background and (conjectural) early experience during the Peloponnesian war, providing the general reader with basic historical information on such phenomena as pederasty, symposia, and the ephebeia; its most surprising feature is the ascription to Plato, without any hesitation, of belief in reincarnation (15, an idea not in fact explained at all until its fourth mention, on 113). Chapter 2, ‘The Intellectual Environment’, deals in broadbrush fashion with the influence on Plato of both Presocratic thought and Socrates, the latter’s search for moral and political knowledge providing the essential antidote to Sophistic relativism and amoralism, though Waterfield helpfully sketches the diversity of ‘the first Socratics’ as a larger group (‘there was no such thing as Socratic orthodoxy’, 56). Chapter 3, starting to draw on the Seventh Letter, recounts Plato’s shortlived attraction to the Thirty at the end of the Peloponnesian war and the revulsion from practical politics caused by both that grim episode and the prosecution of Socrates. It also introduces the problem of dating the dialogues, putting its faith, partly on the basis of stylometrics, in a version of the familiar tripartite model (early-middle-late) of Plato’s work, as well as accepting, with (to my mind) too hasty an inference from Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae , that a ‘proto- Republic ’ existed as early as the 390s (76-7). [3] A rough-and-ready chronological framework for the dialogues’ composition concludes the chapter (94).

In the remainder of the book, Waterfield builds up a picture of a Plato whose life was an unresolved quest, in both word and deed, to harmonise a realm of absolute truth with the all-too-human imperfections of the world around him. Chapter 4 expounds the start of that quest, in the earlier dialogues (about whose precise ‘Socratic’ credentials Waterfield somewhat hedges his bets), as driven by a conviction of ‘virtue as knowledge’, a desire to expose false pretensions to knowledge on the part of sophists, politicians, and poets, and adherence to a method of critical thinking which, according to Waterfield, is ‘the foundation of the humanities’ (109). The chapter also recounts Plato’s first trip to Magna Graecia (where, reliant on his intuition, Waterfield has ‘no doubt’ that he met Dionysius I: 119) and lends some credence to stories of his temporary enslavement. Chapter 5 discusses the foundation of the Academy (dated to 383), its nature as a sort of research institute of independent scholars (as well as, more controversially, a sort of political ‘consultancy’), its rivalry with Isocrates’ school, and its notoriety as reflected in contemporary comedy. Chapter 6 juxtaposes the philosophised eros of Symposium and Phaedrus with the so-called Theory of Forms, depicting Plato’s mind as permeated by a ‘mysticism’ derived from the Pythagoreans (168, though oddly the language of mysticism occurs nowhere else than this one page). Despite metaphysics and mysticism, Plato, for Waterfield, remained committed to practical politics, and Chapter 7, following the Seventh Letter in detail, retells the story of the fateful second and third visits to Sicily with their putative failure to win Dionysius II for philosophy and/or to reconcile the tyrant with Plato’s friend Dion. Waterfield is prepared to convict Plato of ‘a certain naiveté’ (199, 207) in all this; others, even if they accept the authenticity of the Seventh Letter (as I myself do not), might wonder whether grotesque misjudgement would be an apter verdict. The point carries over to Chapter 8, which deals with the philosopher’s final years (as well as, briefly, the Academy after his death) and recycles the notion that it took his dealings with Dionysius II to make Plato finally ‘change his mind’ about the possibilities of political leadership (212) and resort to the ‘mundane realism’ of the Laws (216).

In conclusion, Plato of Athens attractively fulfils its aim of introducing Platonic philosophy to a general readership by combining elements of historical reconstruction with key values extracted from the written work, the two things synthesised into an imagined portrait of a life. If it cuts some corners as regards the most contentious matters of Platonic scholarship and interpretation (there is, among other things, no more than a passing remark on 81-2 about the special status of the myths, which are mostly treated as readily decoded into philosophical propositions), that is perhaps inevitable in a book of this kind. One can confidently expect that if indeed some of Waterfield’s readers may never have tackled any of the dialogues for themselves, they will be stimulated to do so (and in Waterfield’s own fine translations) by his eloquent passion for a ‘super-important’ thinker who is now ‘read and studied in, I dare say, every country in the world’ (xxii-iii).

I noticed hardly any errors or misprints: in the stemma on p. 7 the label ‘the poet’ for the older Critias belongs to the younger Critias, ‘the oligarch’, and p. 194 confuses Dion’s Athenian friend (and later assassin) Callippus with the astronomer of the same name from Cyzicus. The book is rather faintly printed; its eleven miscellaneous black-and-white images are consequently dull.

[1] For further details, together with an interesting outline of his multi-stranded career as academic, editor, independent scholar, and more besides, see Waterfield’s own website at https://www.robinwaterfield.com/

[2] Specialists, in turn, may wish to notice some issues on which Waterfield nails his colours to the mast: he dismisses the idea of the ‘unwritten doctrines’ (152-3); he takes the tripartite soul to be of Pythagorean inspiration (168, 173-4); he thinks the Apology ’s story of Chaerephon’s question to the Delphic oracle is Platonic fiction (100-1).

[3] For some counter-considerations, see my Plato Republic 5 (Warminster, 1993) 224-5.

Chapter 2: The Origins of Western Philosophy

Socrates and plato.

Socrates is widely regarded as the founder of philosophy and rational inquiry. He was born around 470 B.C., and tried and executed in 399 B.C.. Socrates was the first of the three major Greek philosophers; the others being Socrates’ student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle.

Socrates did not write anything himself. We know of his views primarily through Plato’s dialogues where Socrates is the primary character. Socrates is also known through plays of Aristophanes and the historical writings of Xenophon. In many of Plato’s dialogues it is difficult to determine when Socrates’ views are being represented and when the character of Socrates is used as a mouthpiece for Plato’s views.

Socrates was well known in Athens. He was eccentric, poor, ugly, brave, stoic, and temperate. He was a distinguished veteran who fought bravely on Athens’ behalf and was apparently indifferent to the discomforts of war. Socrates claimed to hear a divine inner voice he called his daimon and he was prone to go into catatonic states of concentration.

The conflicting views of the Ionian and Eleatic philosophers of nature encouraged skepticism about our ability to obtain knowledge through rational inquiry. Among the Sophists, this skepticism is manifested in epistemic and Moral Relativism. Epistemic relativism is the view that there is no objective standard for evaluating the truth or likely truth of our beliefs. Rather, epistemic standards of reasoning are relative to one’s point of view and interests. Roughly, this is the view that what is true for me might not be true for you (when we are not just talking about ourselves). Epistemic relativism marks no distinction between knowledge, belief, or opinion on the one hand, and truth and reality on the other. To take a rather silly example, if I think it’s Tuesday, then that’s what’s true for me; and if you think it’s Thursday, then that’s what is true for you. In cases like this, epistemic relativism seems quite absurd, yet many of us have grown comfortable with the notion that, say, beliefs about the moral acceptability of capital punishment might be true for some people and not for others.

Moral Relativism is the parallel doctrine about moral standards. The moral relativist takes there to be no objective grounds for judging some ethical opinions to be correct and others not. Rather, ethical judgments can only be made relative to one or another system of moral beliefs and no system can be evaluated as objectively better than another. Since earlier attempts at rational inquiry had produced conflicting results, the Sophists held that no opinion could be said to constitute knowledge. According to the Sophists, rather than providing grounds for thinking some beliefs are true and others false, rational argument can only be fruitfully employed as rhetoric, the art of persuasion. For the epistemic relativist, the value of reason lies not in revealing the truth, but in advancing one’s interests. The epistemic and Moral Relativism of the Sophist has become popular again in recent years and has an academic following in much “post- modern” writing.

Socrates was not an epistemic or moral relativist. He pursued rational inquiry as a means of discovering the truth about ethical matters. But he did not advance any ethical doctrines or lay claim to any knowledge about ethical matters. Instead, his criticism of the Sophists and his contribution to philosophy and science came in the form of his method of inquiry.

As the Socratic Method is portrayed in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, interlocutor proposes a definition or analysis of some important concept, Socrates raises an objection or offers counter examples, then the interlocutor reformulates his position to handle the objection. Socrates raises a more refined objection. Further reformulations are offered, and so forth. Socrates uses the dialectic to discredit others’ claims to knowledge. While revealing the ignorance of his interlocutors, Socrates also shows how to make progress towards more adequate understanding.

A good example of the Socratic Method at work can be found in one of Plato’s early Socratic dialogues, Euthyphro .

• Here is a link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1642 .
• Here is Euthyphro as an audiobook: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19840.

In Plato’s dialogues we often find Socrates asking about the nature of something and then critically examine proposed answers, finding assorted illuminating objections that often suggest next steps. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro are discussing the nature of piety or holiness. Socrates and Euthyphro never conclusively discover what piety is, but they learn much about how various attempts to define piety fail. The dialogue works the same if we substitute moral goodness for piety. Understood in this way, Euthyphro provides a classic argument against Divine Command Theory, a view about the nature of morality that says that what is right is right simply because it is commanded by God.

Socrates would not have us believe our questions have no correct answers. He is genuinely seeking the truth of the matter. But he would impress on us that inquiry is hard and that untested claims to knowledge amount to little more than vanity. Even though Euthyphro and Socrates don’t achieve full knowledge of the nature of piety, their understanding is advanced through testing the answers that Euthyphro suggests. We come to see why piety can’t be understood just by identifying examples of it. While examples of pious acts fail to give us a general understanding of piety, the fact that we can identify examples of what is pious suggests that we have some grasp of the notion even in the absence of a clear understanding of it.

After a few failed attempts to define piety, Euthyphro suggests that what is pious is what is loved by the gods (all of them, the Greeks recognized quite a few). Many religious believers continue to hold some version of Divine Command Theory. In his response to Euthyphro, Socrates points us towards a rather devastating critique of this view and any view that grounds morality in authority. Socrates asks whether what is pious is pious because the gods love it or whether the gods love what is pious because it is pious. Let’s suppose that the gods agree in loving just what is pious. The question remains whether their loving the pious explains its piety or whether some things being pious explains why the gods love them. Once this question of what is supposed to explain what is made clear, Euthyphro agrees with Socrates that the gods love what is pious because it is pious. The problem with the alternative view, that what is pious is pious because it is loved by the gods, is that this view makes piety wholly arbitrary. Anything could be pious if piety is just a matter of being loved by the gods. If the gods love puppy torture, then this would be pious. Hopefully this seems absurd. Neither Socrates nor Euthyphro is willing to accept that  what is pious is completely arbitrary. At this point, Socrates points out to Euthyphro that since an act’s being pious is what explains why the gods love it, he has failed to give an account of what piety is. The explanation can’t run in both directions. In taking piety to explain being loved by the gods, we are left lacking an explanation of what piety itself is. Euthyphro gives up shortly after this failed attempt and walks off in a huff.  If we substitute talk of God making things right or wrong by way of commanding them for talk of the gods loving what is pious in this exchange of ideas, we can readily see that Divine Command Theory has the rather unsavory result that torturing innocent puppies would be right if God commanded it. We will return to this problem when we take up ethical theory later in the course. While we don’t reach the end of inquiry into piety (or goodness) in Euthyphro , we do make discernible progress in coming to see why a few faulty accounts must be set aside. Socrates does not refute the skeptic or the relativist Sophist by claiming to discover the truth about anything. What he does instead is show us how to engage in rational inquiry and show us how we can make progress by taking the possibility of rational inquiry seriously.

Plato (429-347 B.C.) came from a family of high status in ancient Athens. He was a friend and fan of Socrates and some of his early dialogues chronicle events in Socrates’ life. Socrates is a character in all of Plato’s dialogues. But in many, the figure of Socrates is employed as a voice for Plato’s own views. Unlike Socrates, Plato offers very developed and carefully reasoned views about a great many things. Here we will briefly introduce his core metaphysical, epistemological and ethical views.

Metaphysics and Epistemology

Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology are best summarized by his device of the divided line. The vertical line between the columns below distinguishes reality and knowledge. It is divided into levels that identify what in reality corresponds with specific modes of thought.

Here we have a hierarchy of Modes of Thought, or types of mental representational states, with the highest being knowledge of the forms and the lowest being imaging (in the literal sense of forming images in the mind). Corresponding to these degrees of knowledge we have degrees of reality. The less real includes the physical world, and even less real, our representations of it in art. The more real we encounter as we inquire into the universal natures of the various kinds of things and processes we encounter. According to Plato, the only objects of knowledge are the forms which are abstract entities.

In saying that the forms are abstract, we are saying that while they do exist, they do not exist in space and time. They are ideals in the sense that a form, say the form of horse-ness, is the template or paradigm of being a horse. All the physical horses partake of the form of horse-ness, but exemplify it only to partial and varying degrees of perfection. No actual triangular object is perfectly triangular, for instance. But all actual triangles have something in common, triangularity. The form of triangularity is free from all of the imperfections of the various actual instances of being triangular. We get the idea of something being more or less perfectly triangular. For various triangles to come closer to perfection than others suggests that there is some ideal standard of “perfectly triangularity.” This for Plato, is the form of triangularity. Plato also takes moral standards like justice and aesthetic standards like beauty to admit of such degrees of perfection. Beautiful physical things all partake of the form of beauty to some degree or another. But all are imperfect in varying degrees and ways. The form of beauty, however, lacks the imperfections of its space and time bound instances. Perfect beauty is not something we can picture or imagine. But an ideal form of beauty is required to account for how beautiful things are similar and to make sense of how things can be beautiful to some less than perfect degree or another.

Only opinion can be had regarding the physical things, events, and states of affairs we are acquainted with through our sensory experience. With physical things constantly changing, the degree to which we can grasp how things are at any given place and time is of little consequent. Knowledge of the nature of the forms is a grasp of the universal essential natures of things. It is the intellectual perception of what various things, like horses or people, have in common that makes them things of a kind. Plato accepts Socrates’ view that to know the good is to do the good. So his notion of epistemic excellence in seeking knowledge of the forms will be a central component of his conception of moral virtue.

Plato offers us a tripartite account of the soul. The soul consists of a rational thinking element, a motivating willful element, and a desire-generating appetitive element. Plato offers a story of the  rational element of the soul falling from a state of grace (knowledge of the forms) and dragged down into a human state by the unruly appetites. This story of the soul’s relation to the imperfect body supports Plato’s view that the knowledge of the forms is a kind of remembrance. This provides a convenient source of knowledge as an alternative to the merely empirical and imperfect support of our sense experience. Plato draws an analogy between his conception of the soul and a chariot drawn by two horses, one obedient, the other rebellious. The charioteer in this picture represents the rational element of the soul, the good horse the obedient will, and the bad horse, of course, represents those nasty earthly appetites. To each of the elements of the soul, there corresponds a virtue; for the rational element there is wisdom, for the willing element of the soul there is courage, and for the appetitive element there is temperance. Temperance is matter of having your appetites under control. This might sound like chronic self-denial and repression, but properly understood, it is not. Temperance and courage are cultivated through habit. In guiding our appetites by cultivating good habits, Plato holds, we can come to desire what is really good for us (you know, good diet, exercise, less cable TV, and lots more philosophy – that kind of stuff).

Wisdom is acquired through teaching, via the dialectic, or through “remembrance.” Perhaps, to make the epistemological point a little less metaphysically loaded, we can think of remembrance as insight. A more general virtue of justice is conceived as each thing functioning as it should.

To get Plato’s concept of justice as it applies to a person, think of the charioteer managing and controlling his team; keeping both horses running in the intended direction and at the intended speed. Justice involves the rational element being wise and in charge. For a person to be just is simply a matter of having the other virtues and having them functioning together harmoniously.

Given Plato’s ethical view of virtue as a matter of the three elements of the soul functioning together as they should, Plato’s political philosophy is given in his view of the state as the human “writ at large.” Project the standards Plato offers for virtue in an individual human onto the aggregate of individuals in a society and you have Plato’s vision of the virtuous state. In the virtuous state, the rational element (the philosophers) are in charge. The willing element (the guardians or the military class) is obedient and courageous in carrying out the policies of the rational leadership. And the appetitive element (the profit-driven business class) functions within the rules and constraints devised by the rational element (for instance, by honestly adhering to standards of accounting). A temperate business class has the profit motive guided by the interests of the community via regulation devised by the most rational. The virtuous business class refrains from making its comfort and indulgence the over-riding concern of the state. Plato, in other words, would be no fan of totally free markets, but neither would he do away with the market economy altogether.

Plato’s vision of social justice is non-egalitarian and anti-democratic. While his view would not be popular today, it is still worthwhile to consider his criticism of democracy and rule by the people. Plato has Socrates address this dialectically by asking a series of questions about who we would want to take on various jobs. Suppose we had grain and wanted it processed into flour.

We would not go to the cobbler or the horse trainer for this, we’d go to the miller. Suppose we had a horse in need of training. We obviously would not go to the miller or the baker for this important task, we’d go to the horse trainer. In general, we want important functions to be carried out by the people with the expertise or wisdom to do them well. Now suppose we had a state to run. Obviously we would not want to turn this important task over to the miller, the cobbler, or the horse trainer. We’d want someone who knows what he or she is doing in charge. Plato has a healthy regard for expertise. As Plato sees it, democracy amounts to turning over the ethically most important jobs to the people who have the least expertise and wisdom in this area. There is very little reason to expect that a state run by cobblers, millers, and horse trainers will be a virtuous state.

• Socrates and Plato. Authored by : W. Russ Payne. Provided by : Bellevue College. Located at : https://commons.bellevuecollege.edu/wrussellpayne/an-introduction-to-philosophy/ . Project : https://commons.bellevuecollege.edu/wrussellpayne/an-introduction-to-philosophy/. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial

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