Plato

Who Was Plato?

Plato is the most influential philosopher in the Western tradition and the thinker whose account of reality as organized around transcendent, eternal Forms — of which the physical world is an imperfect copy — provided the philosophical vocabulary that the early Christian theologians used to articulate the gospel. Born in Athens around 428 BC into an aristocratic family, he was a student of Socrates and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. His student Aristotle disagreed with his metaphysics but built on his methods.

His major works — the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and the Apology — constitute one of the most sustained and most original bodies of philosophical writing in any language. The Republic’s account of justice, the soul, and the ideal state; the Symposium’s account of the ascent of love from physical beauty to the Beautiful itself; the Phaedo’s argument for the immortality of the soul — these remain indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the philosophical background of the Christian theological tradition.

Plato is significant for TLA because his philosophy is the most sustained ancient attempt to articulate what the human being is reaching for when it reaches beyond the physical world — the Form of the Good, the Beautiful, the True — and because his account of this reaching prepared the intellectual conditions within which the gospel could be received and understood.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Apology of Socrates — c. 399 BC
• The Symposium — c. 385–370 BC
• The Republic — c. 380 BC
• The Phaedo — c. 360 BC
• The Phaedrus — c. 370 BC
• The Timaeus — c. 360 BC
• The Laws — c. 347 BC — unfinished at death