Author
Plato
4th-century BCE Greek philosopher, -427–-347
Their life
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher of Classical Athens, dated c. 428 to 347 BC. He is generally regarded as the foundational thinker of the Western philosophical tradition. He developed the literary dialogue and dialectic as forms of writing and argument, and his work shaped nearly every major area of theoretical and practical philosophy.
In Athens he founded the Academy, a school where he taught. The body of doctrines taught there later came to be called Platonism. His best-known idea is the Theory of Forms, sometimes called the Theory of Ideas, which he proposed as a solution to what is now called the problem of universals. He drew on earlier pre-Socratic thinkers, including Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, though much of what survives about those thinkers comes from Plato's own writings.
Plato stands beside his teacher Socrates and his student Aristotle as a central figure in Western philosophy. His complete works are believed to have survived, unlike those of almost all his contemporaries, and they have been read and studied continuously, though their popularity has risen and fallen over time. Through Neoplatonism, a later development of Platonism, his ideas also affected Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy. In modern times,
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