Theory of Forms
What truly exists are the eternal, unchanging Forms; beautiful things in the sensible world merely participate in Beauty itself.
Ancient Greece & Rome · c. 428–348 BCE
Plato
柏拉图 · Πλάτων
Built Socrates' questions into the theory of Forms, founded the Academy, and set the agenda of Western philosophy in dialogue form.
PlatonismBirthplace: Athens
Philosophy begins in wonder.
Source: Theaetetus 155d
Born into the Athenian aristocracy, Plato meant to enter politics; the execution of Socrates disillusioned him completely. He left Athens for over a decade, met Pythagoreans in southern Italy, and around 387 BCE returned to found the Academy, a school that lasted nine hundred years.
All his works are dialogues, and Socrates is nearly always the protagonist. The early dialogues seek definitions of the virtues without finding them. The middle works, the Phaedo, Symposium and Republic, present the theory of Forms: sensible things are shadows of eternal Forms, and the philosopher's task is to climb out of the cave into the sunlight. The late Parmenides and Sophist subject that theory to severe self-criticism.
The Republic is at once political philosophy and a theory of the soul: the city has three classes, the soul three parts, and justice is each keeping to its place. Twice he sailed to Syracuse hoping to make a philosopher-king of its tyrant, and twice he failed. Whitehead said the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Key Ideas
The allegory of the cave
Prisoners take shadows on a wall for reality; philosophical education is the unchaining, the turning round and the climb toward the sun outside.
Knowledge as recollection
Learning acquires nothing new; the soul recollects Forms it beheld before birth.
The philosopher-king
Until philosophers rule or rulers truly philosophise, there will be no end to the troubles of cities.
Influenced by
Influenced
- Aristotle
- Cicero
- Plotinus
- Augustine of Hippo
- Boethius
- Pico della Mirandola
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Plato's Forms became in his system the grades of the Will's objectification, the objects of aesthetic contemplation.
- John Stuart Mill
- Friedrich Nietzsche
He called Plato the source of all decadence: to place the true world beyond is to slander this one. Christianity is 'Platonism for the people'.
- Alfred North Whitehead
His remark that the European philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Plato comes from Process and Reality; his 'eternal objects' are Plato's Forms.
- G. E. Moore
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
Both his doctorate and his habilitation were on Plato, and the structure of dialogue, question and answer in shared inquiry, became his model for all understanding.
- Karl Popper
The first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies reads Plato's Republic as a blueprint for totalitarianism, a reading still fiercely disputed.
- Emmanuel Levinas
He returned again and again to the Republic's 'the Good beyond being', reading it as the one testimony in the Western tradition to the priority of ethics over ontology.
- Donald Davidson
- Jacques Derrida
'Plato's Pharmacy' reads the Phaedrus and finds that pharmakon is both remedy and poison, so that Plato's devaluation of writing cannot stand within his own text.
- Alain Badiou
He calls himself a Platonist, defending Ideas, truth and mathematics in an anti-Platonic century, and even rewrote the Republic.