Plato
Plato born 427 BCE was the student and successor to the great Greek philosopher Socrates.
Plato
Life
Plato born 427 BCE was the student and successor to the great Greek philosopher Socrates. He lived during a very turbulent time, perhaps most influential on him were the Peloponnesian War and the execution of his mentor and friend Socrates. His dialogues are among the greatest works of classical Greece.
works
His dialogue of Gorgias lays out a lawful argument in favor of tending toward the good for the sake of the good. His Republic dialogue lays out the archetype of a just state, and his dialogue of Meno demonstrates how universal laws can be lawfully discovered by any human, even a slave.
After the death of Socrates he created the Platonic Academy in Athens, in his honor, with the intention of creating philosopher kings. Aristotle was perhaps the academy’s most famous graduate although nearly a decade after graduating he would found his own Lyceum committed to attacking the method of his teacher.
Many historians do their best to conflate his ideas with those of his student Aristotle simply based on this student teacher relationship and history. The problem with making this assertion is that Aristotle in his own writings and Lyceum teachings contradicts this.
Dialogue of Gorgias
Plato in his writing often depicted real historically figures such as Gorgias of Leontini in the dialogue of Gorgias, many have alleged that the star of the dialogues, Socrates, was a contrivance of Plato’s mind. Although it seem unlikely that Plato who have dedicated his life to a fiction.
Returning to his writing, Plato has produced at least 45 dialogues throughout his life including many influential works such Gorgias, Republic, Timaeus, Meno, Apology, Parmenides, and Laws. His works competently convey the diversity, range and scope of classical thought.
Death
He likely died in 347 BCE at the age of 80, although many history claim that he was as old a 84 when he died. Long after his death his timeless works remain influential and for good reason. In the dialogue Gorgias for example, he lays out a pioneering argument for doing the good thing over what is simply pleasurable or expedient.
His Republic composed of 10 books, lays out in book VI and VII a competent method of seeking truth. The Timaeus contains a description of his platonic solids, and his book III of the Laws dialogue, articulates a theory of how music decays that will send chills down the spine of every music purist.
The dialogue of Meno demonstrates how even an illiterate, uneducated slave can discover a universal principle with their own mind.
influence on society
Much of his work would have been lost during the medieval period had it not been preserved by Islamic scholars. The spread of platonic ideas spawned much of Europe’s social and industrial development.
Several movements were created in his name such a the Christian Platonists such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquainus. Based on there adherence to his principle of hypothesizing the higher hypothesis, Johannes Kepler, G. Wilhelm Leibniz, and Albert Einstein are rightly considered Platonists.
Plato’s opponents
However, many followers of Gorgias such as Sir Issac Newton and Bertrand Russell, both of who rejected his principle of hypotheses, have been falsely linked to the legacy of Plato.
Sir Issac Newton, speaking of himself in his an essay called General Scholium confessed “I feign no hypothesis.”
Likewise Bertrand Russell, in his book Human knowledge dismisses the idea of forming a hypothesis altogether in a chapter called Knowledge of Fact and Laws.
““I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”
Clearly Newton denounces the method of Plato generally and his world of the intelligible illuminated by the Good more particularly. He like many other follower’s of Aristotle would seek to restrict the mental capabilities of humanity to the material world and to knowledge of particular things.
““If an individual is to know anything beyond his own personal experience up to the present moment his stock of uninferred knowledge must consist not only of matters of fact but also of general laws, or at least a law, allowing him to make inferences on matters of fact; and such a law or laws must, unlike the principle of deductive logic be synthetic, i.e. not be proved true by their falsehood being self-contradictory. The only alternative to this hypothesis is complete skepticism...
Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge, (1948)”
It should be quite difficult to justly classify either man as a Platonist. Bertrand Russell is willing to go much further with his his attack in the power of hypothesis by saying that nothing that could be contrived in the mind of an individual, could ever be generally applicable to all, as it would necessarily be synthetic, which in his mind is to say not “proved true by their falsehood being self-contradictory.”
For this reason, namely his conviction that the results of discoveries made in application of Plato’s method could never be proved scientifically or generalized wider than the individuals own context, it would be a difficult for any competent historian to count Bertrand Russell among the Platonist.
““Gripped by a frenzied and excessive lust for pleasure, they jumbled together laments and hymns, mixed paeans with dithyrambs, and even imitated pipe tunes on the lyre. The result was a total confusion of styles. Unintentionally, in their idiotic way, they misrepresented their art, claiming that in music there are no standards of right and wrong at all, but that the most “correct” criterion is the pleasure of a man who enjoys the performance, whether he is a good man or not.”
Every serious student of philosophy should own his Plato Complete Works edited by John M. Cooper.