PLATO

Plato (427?-347 B.C.) is one of the immortal geniuses of philosophy. Born in Athens to a wealthy and politcally influenced aristrocratic family, he was closely related as a young man with Socrates, who died when Plato was in his late twenties. When the democracy was restored, Plato's family fell out of favour, and his hostility to democratic government is reflected in a number of his works. At some time after Socrates', death, perhaps as much as fifteen years or more, plato started to write dialoques in which moral, political, religious, cosmological, logical, and other subjects were explored. In the early Dialoques, Socrates is always the principal speaker, and there is some reason to suppose that Plato's picture of Socrates' personality and doctrines bears a close resemblance to the actual historical man who was his teacher. Later on, however, the Dialoques clearly come more and more to reflect Plato's own philosophical investigations, and in the works composed last, Socrates disappears altogether as a character.

Retreating from public life, Plato founded a school at his home in Athens, called the "Academy," and the world has since then meant a school or university. Many of the most gifted philosophers of the day worked or studied at the Academy, including the other great genius of ancient thought, Aristotle. Eventually, the Academy became an independent institution, and it continued in existence for almost 900 years before it was finally closed by the Roman emperor Justinian in A.D. 529.

Plato's greatest work was the Republic, a dialoque on the nature of justice, but much of his work in later life was devoted to mathematics and cosmology, and members of the Academy made significant contributions to formal logic and to such \ mathematical fields as solid geometry.