Plato is one of the world’s best known and most widely read and studied philosophers. He was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, and he wrote in the middle of the fourth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Though influenced primarily by Socrates, to the extent that Socrates is usually the main character in many of Plato’s writings, he was also influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans.

Plato was the youngest son of Perictione and Ariston who came from famous wealthy families in Athens. While Plato was in his early age, his father died and his mother remarried Pyrilampes. As a young man he studied under Cratylus. He became friends with Socrates who was a close friend to Plato’s mother’s brother Charmides.

Plato was in military service from 409 BC to 404 BC when the Peloponnesian War was fought between Athens and Sparta but he wanted a political career. In 403 BC, Plato gained great hopes of entering politics again when the democracy was restored at Athens. However, the execution of Socrates had a profound effect on him and he decided that he would have nothing to do with politics.

Plato’s middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are generally regarded as providing Plato’s own philosophy, where the main character in effect speaks for Plato himself. These works blend ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an interconnected and systematic philosophy.

Plato returned to Athens and founded his Academy. It was on the land which had belonged to Academos, and this is where the name “Academy” came from. The Academy was an institution devoted to research and instruction in philosophy and the sciences, and Plato presided over it till his death in 347 BC.

Plato’s Academy, founded in the 380s, was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university (hence the English term academic); an influential centre of research and learning, it attracted many men of outstanding ability. His reasons for setting up the Academy were connected with his earlier ventures into politics. He had been bitterly disappointed with the standards displayed by those in public office and he hoped to train young men who would become statesmen. However, having given them the values that he believed in, he thought that these men would be able to improve the political leadership of the cities of Greece.

His main contributions are in philosophy, mathematics and science where topics such as censorship are discussed and religious philosophy where topics such as atheism, dualism and pantheism are considered. In discussing epistemology, he looked at ideas such as a priori knowledge and Rationalism. In his theory of Forms, Plato rejected the changeable, deceptive world that we are aware of through our senses proposing instead his world of ideas which were constant and true.

Plato’s contributions to the theories of education are shown by the way he ran the Academy and his idea of what constitutes an educated person.

Although Plato made no important mathematical discoveries, his belief that mathematics provides the finest training for the mind was extremely important in it’s the development. He concentrated on the idea of ‘proof’ and insisted on accurate definitions and clear hypotheses. This laid the foundations for Euclid’s systematic approach to mathematics.

In mathematics his name is attached to Platonic solids. In the Timaeus there is a mathematical construction of earth, fire, air, and water in which the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron are given as the shapes of the atoms of earth, fire, air, and water. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, is Plato’s model for the whole universe.

Plato’s beliefs as regards the universe were that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon move round the Earth in crystalline spheres. The sphere of the Moon was closest to the Earth, then the sphere of the Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and furthest away was the sphere of the stars. He believed that the Moon shines by reflected sunlight.

– Arjun Pathak