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Plato: Works
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Plato (429-347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived — a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method — can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.
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Plato was a very important classical Greek philosopher. He lived from 427 BC to 347 BC. He was a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. Plato wrote about many ideas in philosophy that are still talked about today. In fact, one modern philosopher (Alfred North Whitehead) said that all philosophy since Plato was just comments on his works.
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Due to the Academy's safekeeping, many of Plato's works have survived. His extant writings are in the form of letters and dialogues, the most famous of which is probably The Republic. His writings cover subjects ranging from knowledge to happiness to politics to nature.
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Plato ... thought a lot about the natural world and how it works. He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can't see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn't these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like?
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All quotations from Plato's dialogues and other works refer to the pagination of a Renaissance edition by Henri Estienne, called the Stephanus Edition, which is reproduced in most modern editions and translations. This edition was in three volumes, and its pages were divided in five parts referenced a to e. Thus a quotation gives the page number followed by a letter between a and e and refering to the subsection in the page for the starting and ending lines of the quoted section (the volume number is never included, but there is no ambiguity, because no work spreads over several volumes). Some quotations have the letter for the page subsection followed by a line number within the subsection. This may be useful when quoting a single word or a small sequence of words, but is harder to get, because very few editions respect or provide the exact line numbering of the Stephanus edition, and, besides, this is lost in all translation, and may therefore be only approximate.
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Plato's biography is mainly drawn from the work of other ancient writers and a few of Plato's own letters. He was born in Athens around 428 BC to an aristocratic family with a long and esteemed history of political leadership. According to an anecdote of dubious veracity, told by the Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius, Plato was originally named Aristocles. His wrestling coach... dubbed him "Platon" (meaning "broad") on account of his broad shoulders—shoulders that would one day bear the foundational weight of Western thought.
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