Plato
A student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, Plato founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He wrote almost entirely in dialogue form, casting Socrates as the central questioner. His thought spans metaphysics, ethics, politics, and epistemology, unified by the conviction that genuine knowledge concerns unchanging realities rather than the shifting world of the senses.
Schools
Key concepts
Core works
The Republic
c. 375 BCEThe Republic asks what justice is and whether the just life is better than the unjust one. To answer, Plato builds an ideal city in speech, reasoning that justice writ large in a community will be easier to read than justice in a single soul. The city is divided into producers, guardians, and rulers, each performing the role suited to its nature. The dialogue then mirrors this structure in the individual: a soul of appetite, spirit, and reason, just when reason governs with spirit's help. Along the way Plato offers his most famous images — the Sun, the Divided Line, and the Allegory of the Cave — to explain how the philosopher ascends from shadows to knowledge of the Good. The work closes by arguing that the just person flourishes even when the world fails to reward them.
Read summary →
Phaedo
c. 360 BCESet on the day of Socrates' execution, the Phaedo presents his calm defense of the soul's immortality to grieving friends. Socrates argues that the philosopher, having spent life separating reason from bodily distraction, should not fear death, which is simply the soul's release from the body. The dialogue advances several arguments for immortality, culminating in the claim that the soul participates in the Form of Life and so cannot admit its opposite. Whatever the strength of each argument, the work's enduring power lies in its portrait of a man facing death with serenity grounded in philosophical conviction.
Read summary →