Plato comes next in line of the greats, and he was a student of Socrates. Plato’s original name was actually Aristocles, but he was given the nickname Plato. Plato itself means “broad shouldered” which is most likely because he possessed this physical characteristic. Plato was born in Greece around 430 BC and he died in Athens around 370 BC. Plato wrote most of what we know about Socrates because he was one of his students. In addition, Plato wrote about many of the other pre Socratic philosophers and their works. Some of these were Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras. This is the same Pythagoras that was a mathematician that came up with the famous theorem concerning triangles. Plato took in the other teaching of the philosophers, and Plato would lend support to ideas he supported and refute ones he did not. Like Socrates, Plato was able to advance the learning of philosophy to more people than ever. The way that Plato did this was opening his own university. Socrates argued that people should only start learning philosophy after living thirty years (since after living for long enough you can gather enough experience to argue and understand philosophy). Plato started this new academy to have intellectuals discuss and learn from each other. This academy was open to the public and did not charge the people of Greece for use ( at least while Plato was alive). Asides from the academy, Plato is most well known for his works and philosophy that he developed. The most important thing that Plato promoted was his theory of forms. I cannot explain the fullness of the theory of forms in this blog post, but the theory of forms consists of how material things have forms that lead to a higher intellectual reality. This theory of forms will be fully completed by Plato’s student, Aristotle. One of the ways Plato showed the theory of forms is with his well know story that is simply called Plato’s Cave. The story involves men tied up to a way and only shown shadows of things. One day the men escape and see the “real” world and are able to see the real reality of the “forms” that they were only able to see through shadows in the cave. In addition, Plato established the study of Epistemology as we know it. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and how we know whether something is true or not. Plato also wrote various works that expanded and explained various topics. One of these notable topics is “love”. Plato wrote about love, and we get the phrase platonic love from Plato himself. Also, as all philosopher did, Plato wrote about the government of Greece and Athens and said how it should and should not work. There is a lot of this in the book titled The Republic which feature Socrates and other philosophers. Plato added many new fields to philosophy and he established a strong foothold in the academic world for philosophy and other subjects. However, Aristotle would triumph over Plato in almost everything.
Great post! You did a good job explaining Plato as a philosopher. I would like to learn more about the fields of study that Plato introduced and how he can be compared to other philosophers besides Socrates. I think it would be a good idea to explore Plato’s past like his childhood, and early ages to see what motivated him to think openly. I generally find this type of stuff very interesting because I took a philosophy class in high school and many of the perspectives are different. In addition, I liked how you were able to mention the works Plato published and created. It would be interesting to see how these are used today or if they are simply just a part of history now. To improve this blog, I believe it would be a good idea to further your discussion around some of the important things Plato did with his career, use transition words instead of beginning sentences with “Plato”, and add visuals to make the blog more exciting! Great work though!
Before reading this, I did not know much information about ancient Greeks. It is extremely interesting to see how things in our current day date all the way back to these theories. One that made my interest spark was the idea of platonic love. It is mind blowing to me how there can be a whole theory and ideology behind love. Moreover, reading about all of these simple theories made me question how much work actually went into these because even though the thought of it is simple, figuring out how things really work is insanely difficult. Another thing that made me very interested was the study of the shadows and how the men were only exposed to shadows of things but when they escaped they saw what the real world was like. I would like to know what this study concluded and how it changed how people view things. I really would like to get more into these things as it is extremely important to see how studies and philosophy actually works behind the scenes.