Plato

428/427-348/347 BCE · Athenian · Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Soul, Aesthetics, Cosmology

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Born into Athenian aristocracy during the Peloponnesian War, Plato watched democracy condemn his teacher Socrates to death in 399 BCE — and that wound never closed. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand how a city could demand the execution of its wisest man, what genuine knowledge would require, and who should rule. He founded the Academy in Athens and taught there for forty years.

Topics Plato addresses

• the theory of forms
• the form of the good
• the divided line
• the cave allegory
• the sun analogy
• recollection (anamnesis)
• the tripartite soul
• the immortality of the soul
• philosopher-kings
• the just soul and the just city
• kallipolis
• the noble lie
• mimesis and the critique of art
• the four cardinal virtues
• the degenerative succession of constitutions
• the elenchus
• socratic ignorance and aporia
• the ascent of eros
• divine madness
• rhetoric and dialectic
• the demiurge and cosmogony
• the receptacle (chora)
• the communion of kinds
• the third man argument

Converse with Plato on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Plato's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.