Plato

• The most influential of Socrates’ students, Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in human history, and the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.

• Plato has also be cited as one of the founders of Western religion and spirituality. The so-called neoplationism of philosophers such as Plotinus and Porphyry greatly influenced Christianity through Church Fathers such as Augustine. Afred North Whitehead once noted: “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that is consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Unlike the work of nearly all his contemporaries, Plato’s entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Although their popularity has fluctuated, Plato’s works have consistently been read and studied.

key contributions from Plato

• Innatism

  • the view that the mind is born with already formed ideas, knowledge and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism.

• Theory of forms

  • the physical work is not as real or true as “Forms”. According to this theory, Forms (ideas) are the non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, which objects and matter in the physical work merely imitate, resemble or participate in. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters in his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge.

• Idealism

  • the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered “real”. Because there are different types of idealism, it is difficult to define the term uniformly.

• Theory of soul

  • Inspired by the teachings of Socrates, considered the psyche to be the essence of a person, being that which decides how people behave. Plato considered this essence to be an incorporeal, external occupant of a person’s being. Plato said that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think. He believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn (metempsychosis) in subsequent bodies. Plato divided the soul into three parts: the logistikon (reason), the thymodeides (spirit, which houses anger, as well as other spirited emotions), and the epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures).