Plato

Plato was born around 428 BCE into one of the most distinguished aristocratic families in Athens. His father, Ariston, traced descent from the early Athenian kings; his mother, Perictione, was related to Critias and Charmides, two of the Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. His given name was probably Aristocles; "Plato" — supposedly a nickname referring to his broad build or broad forehead — is what stuck. He came of age during the long Athenian decline, watched the city lose its empire and its democracy, and saw his teacher Socrates condemned to death by the restored democratic regime in 399 BCE. The execution was the defining event of his intellectual life.

He traveled in the years after Socrates's death — to Megara, possibly to Egypt, certainly to southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean mathematicians and the political court of the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse. Around 387 BCE he returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school in a grove sacred to the hero Academus that would operate, in various forms, for nearly a thousand years. Aristotle studied there for twenty years. The Academy was not a "university" in the modern sense — it was something closer to a research community organized around mathematical and dialectical inquiry — but it was the first institutionalized site of sustained philosophical work in the Western tradition.

The dialogues, of which roughly thirty-five survive (some of disputed authenticity), are the form Plato chose to do philosophy in, and the choice matters. Socrates is the central speaker in most of them, but the Socrates of the early dialogues — Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Charmides — who mostly asks questions and exposes the confusions of his interlocutors, gradually becomes a vehicle for positive doctrines Socrates himself probably did not hold. Where the historical Socrates ends and the Platonic Socrates begins is a question the scholarship has been arguing about for two millennia.

The Republic (c. 375 BCE) is the most ambitious of the dialogues and the one most often read first. It begins with a question about justice — is it better to be just or unjust? — and expands into a sustained construction of an ideal city-state, the kallipolis, organized into three classes (producers, guardians, philosopher-rulers) corresponding to three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit, reason). Along the way it contains the Allegory of the Cave, the divided line, the theory of Forms, an extended attack on poetry and mimetic art, a defense of the philosophical life, and a myth of reincarnation. The political program is illiberal in ways that have made Plato a target of modern liberal critique — most famously Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), which read The Republic as a blueprint for totalitarianism. The reading is reductive but not baseless; the book really does propose censorship, eugenics, and rule by an unaccountable philosophical elite. It is also, in its long central books on knowledge and the Forms, one of the foundational texts of Western metaphysics.

The later dialogues — Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Parmenides, Laws — are more technical and less read outside academic philosophy, but the Timaeus in particular (a cosmological dialogue) shaped medieval and Renaissance thought through Latin translations more than any other Platonic text. He died around 348 BCE, around the age of eighty.

For new readers, the Hackett complete works edited by John Cooper is the scholarly standard; the Penguin editions are cheaper and adequate for first reading. Start with Apology (twenty pages, Socrates's defense speech at his trial), then Crito, then The Republic. Reading the early dialogues before the longer ones recovers the conversational pressure that the systematic later works can flatten.