Plato is arguably the single most influential philosopher of all time.Plato's work extends to virtually every area of philosophy.
Although Plato's writings extend to every corner of academia, political philosophy was his most common subject. In "Republic," perhaps the most famous of his dialogues, he tackled the difficult questions of what constitutes justice and how a just state should function. Plato's answers were controversial, and "Republic" has encouraged philosophical debate in every century after its writing.
Plato also studied and wrote extensively on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Two of Plato's most important dialogues, "Phaedrus" and "Gorgias," address questions about the nature of rhetoric, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For Plato, rhetoric and argument was a way to deduce truths about the world through careful introspection. However, he also saw rhetoric as a potentially dangerous weapon in the hands of sophists and demagogues.
Yet another of Plato's essential contribution to philosophy is his work on epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, or how people come to know things. According to the European Graduate School, Plato was among the first philosophers to consider the idea of a priori knowledge, defined as knowledge that exists independent of experience. In "Republic" and other dialogues, Plato argued that human experience was always limited and deceptive. The real truth, he said, emerged not from the real world but from the world of ideas. Plato argued that idealized "forms" represented the true, perfect version of every thing or idea in the universe. This powerful concept has puzzled and inspired great philosophers like David Hume, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida for generations.
Beyond his writings and findings, Plato also contributed to philosophy a new method for answering philosophical questions. Nearly all of Plato's writings took the form of dialogues between Socrates and various other characters. The characters disagree and argue with each other. Plato's use of dialogue pitted arguments and ideas against each other, allowing the best ideas to rise to the surface. This dialectical method ensures rigorous scrutiny of every premise and conclusion. Although few modern philosophers write in dialogue, the dialectic has influenced subsequent methods of philosophical explication.
Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived between the 5th and the 4th century BC. He is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of all time, still hugely influential to this day. His thought is so vast and complex that we can't begin to do justice to it here, so let's just concentrate on arguably the most important aspect of his philosophy—his theory of Ideas.
In very simple terms, Plato believed that the world around us, the world of humans, animals, plants, and objects, was somewhat less than fully real. That doesn't mean that he thought our world was just a dream, a fantasy, some kind of mirage. Our world is real, alright; it's just that there's a higher reality for Plato. This world is the world of Ideas.
Ideas, according to Plato, are ideal objects of study, the only kind that can give us true knowledge. The world around us, the material world, is in a constant state of change and decay. Plato thinks, therefore, that we can't really gain any enduring knowledge from such a rapidly-changing world. There must be something permanent, something that endures, something that doesn't decay or die if we're to have genuine knowledge.
This is where Ideas come into the equation. Ideas are like an underlying substance to the things we experience every day. For example, we see many beautiful things, such as flowers, birds, and sunsets. But as natural phenomena, they are always prone to change. These examples of natural beauty are inferior copies of the Idea of Beauty. And it is in the Idea of Beauty where knowledge of what beauty is really lies. Once we understand this, we can compare beautiful things in our everyday world to the Idea of Beauty and see that they always fall short of the ideal.
We can expand this example to take in other Ideas. We all know of cases where justice has been done, yet they are all imperfect copies of the Idea of Justice, an absolute, unchanging standard to which we should aspire if we are to gain knowledge of ultimate reality. For Plato, an Idea is a kind of blueprint for perfection. Although we can never achieve such perfection in our imperfect material world, we can nonetheless strive for it. And the more successfully we strive, the closer we will come to the ultimate ideal, and the more knowledge we will come to possess.
Plato's belief in the existence of two worlds—an ideal world of absolute truth, beauty, goodness, and so forth, and an imperfect, natural, material world—greatly influenced early Christians, who contrasted the sinful world of humanity on earth with the eternal life enjoyed by the faithful in Christ.
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