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Plato was born in 428 BC and died in 347-8. His father, Ariston, was descended from Cordus, the last king of Athens; his mother, Perictione, was related to Solon, architect of the Athenian constitution. His family was aristocratic and well off. He had two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, both of whom appear in his dialogue, the Republic, as well as a sister, Potone, whose son, Speusippus, was also a philosopher. While Plato was still a boy, his father died and his mother married Pyrilampes, a friend of the great Athenian statesman, Pericles. Thus Plato was no stranger to Athenian politics even from childhood, and was expected to enter it himself. Horrified by actual political events, however, especially by the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, he turned instead to philosophy, thinking that only it could rescue human beings from civil war and political upheaval and provide a sound foundation for ethics and politics.

Plato’s works, which are mostly dialogues, have all survived. They make fundamental contributions to almost every area of philosophy, from ethics, politics, and aesthetics to metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. It is an exaggeration to say that Western philosophy is a serious of footnotes to Plato, but it is not an outrageous exaggeration.

Socrates is the central figure in most of Plato’s works. In the early dialogues he is thought to be based to some extent on the historical figure, but in the transitional, middle and late dialogues, he is thought to be a mouthpiece for Plato’s own doctrines In the transitional dialogues, Socrates, as the embodiment of true philosophy, is contrasted with the sophists. They are for the most part unscrupulous, fee-taking moral relativists who think that moral values are based on convention; he is an honest, fee-eschewing moral realist, who thinks that the true virtues are determined by our nature and are the same for everyone everywhere. The problem latent in this contrast is that people in different cultures seem to have different beliefs about the virtues.

In a number of middle and late dialogues, Plato connects the relativist doctrines he attributes to the sophist with the metaphysical theory of Heraclitus, according to which perceptible things or characteristics are in constant flux or change, always becoming, never being. The theory of flux clearly exacerbates the earlier problem with the Socratic elenchus. If perceptible things and characteristics are always in flux, how can justice and the other virtues be stable forms? How can there be stable definitions of them to serve as correct answers to Socrates’s question? And if there are no stable definitions of them, how can there be such a thing as ethical knowledge? More generally, if perceptible things and characteristics are always becoming, how can anything be something definite or determinate? How can one know or say what anything is? Aristotle tells us that it was reflection on these fundamental questions that led Plato to “separate” the forms from perceptible things and characteristics as Socrates did not.

Conceived of in this way, forms seemed to Plato to offer solutions to the metaphysical and epistemological problems to which the elenchus and flux give rise. As intelligible objects, set apart from the perceptible world, they are above the sway of flux, and therefore available as stable objects of knowledge, stable meanings or referents for words. As real mind-independent entities, they provide the definitions of the virtues with the non-conventional subject-matter Socratic ethics needs.

Dialectic is introduced in the Republic as having a special bearing on first principles of the mathematical sciences. The importance of these sciences in Plato’s thought are twofold. First, they provided a compelling example of a rich body of precise knowledge organized into a deductive system of axioms, definitions and theorems – a model of what philosophy itself might be. Second, the brilliant mathematical treatment of harmony suggested a role for mathematics within philosophy itself. For it opened up the possibility of giving precise definitions in wholly mathematical terms of all characteristics, including such apparently vague and evaluative ones as beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, good and evil, and the other things which Socrates sought definitions.

The emergence to prominence of mathematical science may seem like a major departure from the early dialogues, in which ethics and politics are the nearer exclusive focus. Ethics and politics remain central, but Plato has become aware that they need to be treated as component parts of a much wider and deeper philosophical theory.

The Republic, which is Plato’s single greatest work, offers us a brilliant attempt to articulate that theory in all its complexity. At the center of this work is the concept of the philosopher-king, who unites political power and authority with philosophical knowledge of values based on mathematical science and dialectic – knowledge that is unmediated by conventionally controlled concepts and so is free from the distorting influence of power or ideology. What the philosopher-king does is to construct a political system - including primarily a system of socialization and education – that will distribute the benefits of this specialized knowledge among the citizens at large.

The nature of the system that the philosopher-kings design is based on is Plato’s psychology or theory of the soul. According to it there are three fundamentally different kinds of desires; appetitive ones for food, drink, sex, and the money with which to acquire them: spirited ones for honor, victory, and good reputation; and rational ones for knowledge and truths. Each of these types of desire rules in the soul of a different type of person, determining his values. For people most value what they most desire, so people ruled by different desires have very different conceptions of what is valuable, of their good and happiness. But just which desire rules an individual’s soul depends on the relative strength of his desires and the kind of education and socialization he receives. It is scarcely surprising that Plato believes that the fundamental goal of ethical or political education is not to put knowledge into people’s souls but to train or socialize their desires, turning them around from the pursuit of what they falsely believe to be happiness to the pursuit of true happiness.

Plato was able in the Republic to think about a host of issues in a wholly fresh and revolutionary way. He argues, for example, that in a just society men and women with the same natural abilities should receive the same education, be eligible for the same social positions, and receive the same social rewards. Somewhat less attractively, he also argues that such society would have to deny family life and private property at least to its ruling classes. It is not a totalitarian urge that underlies these prohibitions, however, but a vivid sense of the power of desire and the need to keep it in bounds by reducing temptation.

In the Philebus, attention shifts from knowledge and truth to its greatest object, the good, the relationship of knowledge and pleasure to it, and their joint contributions to the happy life. In the Laws – Plato’s longest work – he turns again to designing a political system, albeit a second-best one intended to be more attainable by actual states than the ideal system described in the Republic. Moral education remains the central business of the system. But political authority is more widely distributed among the citizens, rather than being vested exclusively in the hands of mathematically trained, dialectical philosophers, and the holding of wives, children, and property in common is abandoned.

Plato’s views on love – explored in the Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus – have profoundly influenced almost all subsequent thought on the topic, whether in literature or philosophy proper. Love of an individual, he argues, leads to much more abstract philosophical loves: the love of a beautiful person leads to the love of the form of beauty itself. Sometimes it seems, indeed, that love of the forms actually replaces the love for an individual, who is simply cast aside as the philosopher ascends beyond him. But it may be that Plato simply thinks that to love someone is to want the good for him, so that unless one knows what really is good for him – unless one knows the good – one cannot possibly love.

Besides writing his dialogues, Plato contributed to philosophy by founding the Academy, arguably the first university (385 BC). This was a center of research and teaching in both theoretical subjects and more practical ones. Eudoxus, who gave a geometrical explanation of the revolutions of the sun, moon, and planets, studied and taught in the Academy, and Theaetetus developed solid geometry there. But cities also invited its members to help them in the practical task of developing new political constitutions.

The Academy lasted for many centuries after Plato died. Its early leaders, including his own nephew, Speusippus, who succeeded him, all modified his teaching in various ways. Sometimes, influenced by the early Socratic dialogues, which end in puzzlement, the Academy defended skepticism: at others, influenced by other of Plato’s writings, it was more dogmatic, less insure. Platonism remained the dominant philosophy in the pagan world, influencing St Augustine among others, until the emperor Justinian closed the pagan schools in 529 BC. Much of what passed for Plato’s thought until the 19^th century, when German scholars pioneered a return to Plato’s writings themselves, was a mixture of these different “Platonism”.