What is plato known for

Plato's political philosophy summary

Plato ? An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects.

But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention.

Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle who studied with him , Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank. Among the most important of these abstract objects as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness.

Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or dependent on this distinction.

What did plato believe in government

Many of them explore the ethical and practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object from the body—so much so that it does not depend on the existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its attachment to anything corporeal.

To understand which things are good and why they are good and if we are not interested in such questions, how can we become good? For example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses see for example Phaedo. The form of good in particular is described as something of a mystery whose real nature is elusive and as yet unknown to anyone at all Republic.

Puzzles are raised—and not overtly answered—about how any of the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without falling into contradiction Parmenides , or about what it is to know anything Theaetetus or to name anything Cratylus. When one compares Plato with some of the other philosophers who are often ranked with him—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, for example—he can be recognized to be far more exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they.

His readers are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out that they are in no need of further exploration or development; instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to be interrogated and deployed. Readers of a Platonic dialogue are drawn into thinking for themselves about the issues raised, if they are to learn what the dialogue itself might be thought to say about them.