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Plato: Works
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Plato’s theory of the soul can be found in his major work, *The Republic*, where it is a response to the challenge of the Sophists as to why one ought to live morally. The Sophists in Plato’s time were men who used philosophy for profit, inventing moral loopholes to get people out of obligations, or to excuse what would otherwise be considered immoral behavior. The skeptics ask why one ought to be moral when morality is apparently a social device for maintaining order. But if there are no consequences to “immoral behavior,” then there is no motivational pressure for morality.
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In the Laws, Plato's last work, the philosopher returns once again to the question of how a society ought best to be organized. Unlike his earlier treatment in the Republic, ... the Laws appears to concern itself less with what a best possible state might be like, and much more squarely with the project of designing a genuinely practicable, if admittedly not ideal, form of government. The founders of the community sketched in the Laws concern themselves with the empirical details of statecraft, fashioning rules to meet the multitude of contingencies that are apt to arise in the "real world" of human affairs. A work enormous length and complexity, running some 345 Stephanus pages, the Laws was unfinished at the time of Plato's death. According to Diogenes Laertius (3.37), it was left written on wax tablets.
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Plato's final group of works, written after 367, consists of the Sophist, the Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, and the Laws. The Sophist, takes up the metaphysical question of being and not-being, while the Statesman concludes that the best type of city-state would be the one in which the expert is given absolute authority with no hindrance to his rule from laws or constitution. The Timaeus discusses the rationality inherent in the universe which confirms Plato's scheme, while the Laws, Plato's last work, once again takes up the question of the best framework in which society might function for the betterment of its citizens. Here great stress is laid on an almost mystical approach to the great truth of the rational universe.
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Plato believed the government should rear all children so that everyone would have equal opportunities. Schools would test students on a regular basis. Those who did poorly would be sent to work, while those who did well would continue their studies. At the age of thirty-five, those persons who mastered their education would be sent to the workplace to apply their learning to the real world. After fifteen years, if the student succeeded, they would be admitted to the guardian class.
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When Socrates died, Plato left Athens, staying first in Megara, but then going on to several other places, including perhaps Cyrene, Italy, Sicily, and even Egypt. Strabo (17.29) claims that he was shown where Plato lived when he visited Heliopolis in Egypt. Plato occasionally mentions Egypt in his works, but not in ways that reveal much of any consequence (see, for examples, Phaedrus 274c-275b; Philebus 19b).
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The late dialogues are ... an important place to look for Plato's mature thought on most of the issues dealt with in the earlier dialogues. There is much work still to be done by scholars on the working out of what these views are. The later works are agreed to be difficult and challenging pieces of philosophy. On the whole they are more sober and logical than earlier works, but may hold out the promise of steps towards a solution to problems which were systematically laid out in prior works.
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