Plato

• 1. Introduction

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  Plato wrote that the safest general characterization of European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to him. That line came from Alfred North Whitehead, not from Plato himself, and it captures something strange about a man born in Athens between 428 and 423 BC. His complete works are believed to have survived for over 2,400 years, unlike those of nearly all his contemporaries. Why did this one library endure when so many others vanished. The man behind it never speaks in his own voice. In every dialogue but one, a character named Socrates does the talking, leaving readers to guess where the teacher ends and the student begins. This documentary asks who Plato was, how he turned a city's grief into a philosophy, and why thinkers across Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions kept returning to him. The answers run through tyrants and trials, through trips to Syracuse, and through an olive grove northwest of Athens.

• 2. An Aristocratic Athens

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  Through his mother Perictione, Plato descended from Solon, the statesman credited with laying the foundations of Athenian democracy. His family was aristocratic and influential, and it gave him brothers named Glaucon and Adeimantus, a sister named Potone, and a half brother named Antiphon. Glaucon and Adeimantus would later appear as characters in the Republic. Diogenes Laertius claimed that Plato was a nickname alluding to his robust figure, and that his birth name was Aristocles, meaning best reputation. Modern scholarship widely regards that story as false. Athens during his childhood was at war with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. His older brothers distinguished themselves at the battle of Megara in 409 BC, while Plato, like all male citizens, received a traditional education in gymnastics and music. Ancient writers preserved a tradition that his first love was not philosophy but poetry. He wrote dithyrambs, then lyric poems and a tetralogy of tragedies, and burnt them all when he met Socrates and turned to philosophy. Some epigrams attributed to him survive, though certain scholars now think them spurious.

• 3. The Teacher's Shadow

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  Socrates challenged the focus of early Greek philosophy on natural philosophy, turning instead to ethics and politics through a series of questions now called the Socratic method. Plato first encountered him as a boy in the Palaestra, among other Athenian youths like the Lysis and Menexenus who debate philosophy in the dialogue Lysis. He soon joined Socrates' inner circle. The closeness created a puzzle that scholars still cannot resolve. Every dialogue except the Laws features Socrates, yet Plato never speaks in his own voice, so it is hard to know whose beliefs are on the page. Leo Strauss noted that Socrates' reputation for irony casts doubt on whether the Socrates of the dialogues is sincere. Other ancient writers complicate the picture further. Xenophon's Memorabilia and Aristophanes' The Clouds paint a somewhat different Socrates from Plato's. Aristotle went so far as to attribute a different doctrine of Forms to each man, suggesting that Socrates sought forms through investigation of the natural world, while Plato placed his Forms beyond the ordinary range of human understanding. This tangle is what scholars call the Socratic problem.

• 4. Tyrants And A Trial

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  In 404 BC, Sparta defeated Athens and ended the Peloponnesian War, and the city installed the Thirty Tyrants. Two of Plato's own relatives, Critias and Charmides, sat among them. According to the Seventh Letter, whose authenticity has been disputed, Plato had once imagined a life in public affairs and was even invited to join the administration. He declined. He grew disillusioned by the atrocities of the Thirty, especially when they tried to implicate Socrates in the seizure of the democratic general Leon of Salamis for summary execution. Democracy returned in 403 BC, after exiles entered the city through the Piraeus and met the Thirty at the Battle of Munychia, where both Critias and Charmides were killed. In 401 BC the restored democrats raided Eleusis and killed remaining oligarchic supporters. Life largely returned to normal, as the dialogues set between 401 and 399 BC depict. Then the prosecution of Socrates by Anytus ended Plato's plans for a political career. After Socrates died, Plato remained in Athens for roughly three years before setting out to learn from others.

• 5. Rivers And Numbers

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  Cratylus taught Plato the doctrine of Heraclitus, who held that one cannot step into the same river twice because the waters are always flowing, and that all things exist as a contraposition of opposites. Plato also studied with Hermogenes, an Eleatic in the tradition of Parmenides, who argued the opposite case for a changeless, eternal universe in which change is an illusion. Both men became characters. Heraclitus's views are expounded by Cratylus in the dialogue Cratylus and taken apart in the Theaetetus, while Parmenides and his student Zeno appear in the Parmenides. Around 396 BC, Plato left Athens to study in Megara with Euclid of Megara, founder of the Megarian school. By roughly 394 BC he was back, an Athenian male of military age available to serve in the Corinthian war that ran from 395 to 386 BC. He spent his time studying mathematics with Archytas of Tarentum, Theaetetus, Leodamas of Thasos, and Neocleides in the grove of Hecademus. He likely began the Apology there, along with early drafts of the Gorgias and the Republic. Aristophanes ridiculed an early form of the Republic in the Ecclesiazusae in 391 BC. Speusippus, the son of his sister Potone, joined around 390 BC, and Eudoxus of Cnidus arrived around 385 BC. Later, traveling to southern Italy to study with Archytas and other Pythagoreans, Plato absorbed the idea that all things are number, that the physical world imitates an eternal mathematical one.

• 6. Syracuse And The Academy

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  When Plato was about 40 years old, he visited Syracuse, in roughly 385 BC, while the city was under the rule of Dionysius. The tyrant turned against him, but Dionysius's brother-in-law, Dion of Syracuse, became one of his disciples. Back home, around 383 BC, Plato founded the Academy near the sacred olive grove of Hecademus, a property that began as only a house with a garden. From there until about 366 BC he wrote the majority of his dialogues. The Academy drew mockery as readily as Socrates once had. A fragment from a lost play by Epicrates shows two students locked in fierce debate over the genus of a pumpkin, parodying the Platonic method of diairesis. Aristotle of Stagira arrived in 367 BC, shortly before Plato left for Syracuse again. After Dionysius I died in 367 BC, Plato returned, likely early in 366 BC, at Dion's request, to tutor Dionysius II toward becoming a philosopher king. Dionysius grew suspicious of Dion, expelled him, and Plato eventually gave up and went home. A third trip in 361 BC ended with Dionysius keeping Plato against his will, until his friend Archytas interceded. Dion later overthrew Dionysius and ruled Syracuse from 357 BC until 354 BC, when an Athenian named Calippus usurped him. Plato insisted in the Seventh Letter that Calippus had no connection to the Academy.

• 7. Forms And Souls

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  Francis Cornford identified the twin pillars of Platonism as the theory of Forms and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The theory of Forms denies the reality of the material world, treating it as only an image or copy. There are two kinds of things, on this view: the changing world of material objects grasped by the senses, and an unchanging, unseen world of Forms grasped by reason. Just as individual chairs point to chairness, so justice, truth, and beauty point to objects in another world. One of Plato's favored examples was the truths of geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem, and the theory first appears in the Phaedo. The soul, for Plato, was that which gave life, and he argued it was immortal. In the Republic he divided it into three parts placed in different regions of the body. The Timaeus locates reason in the head, spirit in the top third of the torso, and appetite in the middle third, down to the navel. He also held a theory of reincarnation in dialogues like the Phaedo and Timaeus, though scholars debate whether he meant it literally. From it came a striking claim about knowledge: that learning is recollection of things known before birth. In the Meno, Socrates draws a geometrical fact from a slave boy who could not otherwise have known it, concluding that the knowledge must be of an eternal, non-perceptible Form.

• 8. Justice, Myth, And Afterlives

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  Reality is unavailable to those who use their senses, Socrates insists, going so far as to say that he who sees with his eyes is blind. That contempt for sense-knowledge runs into a famous trap in the Theaetetus. Plato is sometimes credited there with defining knowledge as justified true belief, yet in the same work he identifies problems with that definition, concluding it is circular. His ethics ask sharper questions still. The Euthyphro poses its dilemma directly: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved by them. The Protagoras argues that knowledge is virtue, that no one does bad on purpose. The Republic asks what justice is, and answers through a tripartite society mirroring the soul: productive workers for appetite, protective guardians for spirit, and governing philosopher kings for reason. Socrates traces how such a state declines, from aristocracy to timocracy, then oligarchy, then democracy, and finally tyranny. To carry such ideas, Plato turned to myth, believing most people follow stories more readily than reasoned discourse. He gave the world the story of Atlantis, the Myth of Er, and the Allegory of the Cave. His reach outlived antiquity. Through Neoplatonism, revived by Plotinus, his thought shaped Islamic scholarship, where Al-Farabi proposed an ideal city governed by philosopher kings, and reached the Jewish scholar Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed. In 348 or 347 BC, Plato died and was buried in his garden in the Academy, succeeded by his nephew Speusippus. Centuries later, Edmund Gettier adapted examples from the Theaetetus to challenge the justified true belief account once more, proving that even Plato's unfinished puzzles still set the terms of the argument.