Excerpts from Malcolm Schofield's entry on Plato in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (General Ed. Edward Craig)

Plato (427-347 BCE)

Plato was an Athenian Greek of aristocratic family, active as a philosopher in the first half of the fourth century BCE. He was a devoted follower of Socrates, as his writings make abundantly plain. Nearly all are philosophical dialogues - often works of dazzling literary sophistication - in which Socrates takes center stage. Socrates is usually a charismatic figure who outshines a whole succession of lesser interlocutors, from sophists, politicians and generals to docile teenagers. The most powerfully realistic fictions among the dialogues, such as Protagoras and Symposium, recreate a lost world of exuberant intellectual self-confidence in an Athens not yet torn apart by civil strife or reduced by defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

Some of Plato's earliest writings were evidently composed in an attempt to defend Socrates and his philosophical mission against the misunderstanding and prejudice which - in the view of his friends - had brought about his prosecution and death. Most notable of these are Apology, which purports to reproduce the speeches Socrates gave at his trial, and Gorgias, a long and impassioned debate over the choice between a philosophical and a political life. Several early dialogues pit Socrates against practitioners of rival disciplines, whether rhetoric (as in Gorgias) or sophistic education (Protagoras) or expertise in religion (Euthyphro), and were clearly designed as invitations to philosophy as well as warnings against the pretensions of the alternatives. Apologetic and protreptic concerns are seldom entirely absent from any Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is protagonist, but in others among the early works the emphasis falls more heavily upon his ethical philosophy in its own right. For example, Laches (on courage) and Charmides (on moderation) explore these topics in characteristic Socratic style, relying mostly on his method of elenchus (refutation), although Plato seems by no means committed to a Socratic intellectualist analysis of the virtues as forms of knowledge. That analysis is in fact examined in these dialogues (as also, for example, in Hippias Minor).

In dialogues of Plato's middle period like Meno, Symposium and Phaedo a rather different Socrates is presented. He gives voice to positive positions on a much wider range of topics: not just ethics, but metaphysics and epistemology and psychology too. And he is portrayed as recommending a new and constructive instrument of inquiry borrowed from mathematics, the method of hypothesis. While there are continuities between Plato's early and middle period versions of Socrates, it is clear that an evolution has occurred. Plato is no longer a Socratic, not even a critical and original Socratic: he has turned Socrates into a Platonist.

The two major theories that make up Platonism are the theory of Forms and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The notion of a Form is articulated with the aid of conceptual resources drawn from Eleatic philosophy. The ultimate object of a philosopher's search for knowledge is a kind of being that is quite unlike the familiar objects of the phenomenal world: something eternal and changeless, eminently and exclusively whatever - beautiful or just or equal - it is, not qualified in time or place or relation or respect. An account of the Form of Beautiful will explain what it is for something to be beautiful, and indeed other things are caused to be beautiful by their participation in the Beautiful. The middle period dialogues never put forward any proof of the existence of Forms. The theory is usually presented as a basic assumption to which the interlocutors agree to subscribe. Plato seems to treat it as a very general high-level hypothesis which provides the framework within which other questions can be explored, including the immortality of the soul. According to Phaedo, such a hypothesis will only stand if its consequences are consistent with other relevant truths; according to Republic its validity must ultimately be assured by its coherence with the unhypothetical first principle constituted by specification of the Good.

The Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul, by contrast, is something for which Plato presents explicit proofs whenever he introduces it into discussion. It presupposes the dualist idea that soul and body are intrinsically distinct substances, which coexist during our life, but separate again at death. Its first appearance is in Meno, where it is invoked in explanation of how we acquire a priori knowledge of mathematical truths. Socrates is represented as insisting that nobody imparts such truths to us as information: we work them out for ourselves, by recollecting them from within, where they must have lain untapped as latent memory throughout our lives. But innate forgotten knowledge presupposes a time before the soul entered the body, when it was in full conscious possession of truth. Phaedo holds out the promise that the souls of philosophers who devote their lives to the pursuit of wisdom will upon death be wholly freed from the constraints and contaminations of the body, and achieve pure knowledge of the Forms once again.

Republic, Plato's greatest work, also belongs to this major constructive period of his philosophizing. It gives the epistemology and metaphysics of Forms a key role in political philosophy. The ideally just city (or some approximation to it), and the communist institutions which control the life of its elite governing class, could only become a practical possibility if philosophers were to acquire political power or rulers to engage sincerely and adequately in philosophy. This is because a philosopher-ruler whose emotions have been properly trained and disciplined by Plato's reforming educational programme, and whose mind has been prepared for abstract thought about Forms by rigorous and comprehensive study of mathematics, is the only person with the knowledge and virtue necessary for producing harmony in society. Understanding of Forms, and above all of the Good, keystone of the system of Forms, is thus the essential prerequisite of political order.

It remains disputed how far Plato's vision of a good society ruled by philosopher-statesmen (of both sexes) was ever really conceived as a blueprint for practical implementation. Much of his writing suggests a deep pessimism about the prospects for human happiness. The most potent image in Republic is the analogy of the cave, which depicts ordinary humanity as so shackled by illusions several times removed from the illumination of truth that only radical moral and intellectual conversion could redeem us. And its theory of the human psyche is no less dark: the opposing desires of reason, emotion and appetite render it all too liable to the internal conflict which constitutes moral disease.

While Republic is for modern readers the central text in Plato's œuvre, throughout much of antiquity and the medieval period Timaeus was the dialogue by which he was best known. In this late work Plato offers an account of the creation of an ordered universe by a divine craftsman, who invests pre-existing matter with every form of life and intelligence by the application of harmonious mathematical ratios. This is claimed to be only a 'likely story', the best explanation we can infer for phenomena which have none of the unchangeable permanence of the Forms. None the less Timaeus is the only work among post-Republic dialogues, apart from a highly-charged myth in Phaedrus, in which Plato was again to communicate the comprehensive vision expressed in the Platonism of the middle period dialogues.

Many of these dialogues are however remarkable contributions to philosophy, and none more so than the self-critical Parmenides. Here the mature Parmenides is represented as mounting a powerful set of challenges to the logical coherence of the theory of Forms. He urges not abandonment of the theory, but much harder work in the practice of dialectical argument if the challenges are to be met. Other pioneering explorations were in epistemology (Theaetetus) and philosophical logic (Sophist). Theaetetus mounts a powerful attack on Protagoras' relativist theory of truth, before grappling with puzzles about false belief and problems with the perennially attractive idea that knowledge is a complex built out of unknowable simples. Sophist engages with the Parmenidean paradox that what is not cannot be spoken or thought about. It forges fundamental distinctions between identity and predication and between subject and predicate in its attempt to rescue meaningful discourse from the absurdities of the paradox.

In his sixties Plato made two visits to the court of Dionysius II in Sicily, apparently with some hopes of exercising a beneficial influence on the young despot. Both attempts were abysmal failures. But they did not deter Plato from writing extensively on politics in his last years. Statesman explores the practical knowledge the expert statesman must command. It was followed by the longest, even if not the liveliest, work he ever wrote, the twelve books of Laws, perhaps still unfinished at his death.

Life

Evidence about Plato's life is prima facie plentiful. As well as several ancient biographies, notably that contained in book III of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, we possess a collection of thirteen letters which purport to have been written by Plato. Unfortunately the biographies present what has been aptly characterized as 'a medley of anecdotes, reverential, malicious, or frivolous, but always piquant'. As for the letters, no scholar thinks them all authentic, and some judge that none are.

From the biographies it is safe enough to accept some salient points. Plato was born of an aristocratic Athenian family. He was brother to Glaucon and Adimantus, Socrates' main interlocutors in the Republic; his relatives included Critias and Charmides, members of the bloody junta which seized power in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. He became one of the followers of Socrates, after whose execution he withdrew with others among them to the neighbouring city of Megara. His travels included a visit to the court of Dionysius in Sicily. On returning from Sicily to Athens he began teaching in a gymnasium outside the city, called the Academy.

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Early works

There is widespread scholarly agreement that the following are among Plato's earliest writings: Apology, Crito, Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches and Charmides. Apology, as we have noted, best fits into the context of the decade following Socrates' death, and so does Crito, which explores the question why he did not try to escape from the condemned cell; the others are all short treatments of questions to do with virtue and knowledge, or in the case of Ion, with expertise (techn0), and all are relatively simple in literary structure. The brief Euthyphro and the much longer Protagoras and Gorgias (with which Menexenus is often associated) are usually seen as having many affinities with these, and so are put at least fairly early, although here anticipations of the style or content of the mature middle-period dialogues have also been detected.

The connections in thought between Lysis, Euthydemus and Hippias Major and middle-period Plato may be argued to be stronger still, even though there remain clear similarities with the dialogues generally accepted as early. We do not know whether Plato wrote or published anything before Socrates' death; Menexenus cannot be earlier than 386 BC, Ion might be datable to around 394-391 BC, but otherwise we can only guess.

All those listed above fall under the commonly used description 'Socratic dialogues', because they are seen as preoccupied with the thought of the historical Socrates as Plato understood him, in contrast with writings of the middle period, where 'Socrates' often seems to become a vehicle for exploring a more wide-ranging set of ideas (see Socrates §2). In the Socratic dialogues discussion is confined almost exclusively to ethical questions, or problems about the scope and credentials of expertise: metaphysics and epistemology and speculation about the nature and powers of the soul are for the most part notable by their absence. Use of the elenchus is prominent in them as it is not, for example, in Republic (apart from book I, sometimes regarded as an early work subsequently reused as a preface to the main body of the dialogue). The hypothesis that philosophizing in this style was the hallmark of the historical Socrates is broadly consistent with what we are given to understand about him by Xenophon, Aristotle and Plato's Apology - which is usually thought to be particularly authoritative evidence, whether or not it is a faithful representation of what Socrates really said at his trial.

How historical the historical Socrates of the hypothesis actually is we shall never know. The conjecture that many of the Socratic dialogues are early works is likewise only a guess, which gets no secure support from stylometric evidence. None the less the story of Plato's literary and philosophical development to which it points makes such excellent sense that it has effectively driven all rival theories from the field. The placing of individual dialogues within that story remains a matter for controversy; and doubts persist over how far interpretation of Plato is illuminated or obstructed by acceptance of any developmental pattern.

With these provisos, the account which follows assumes the existence of a group of early Socratic dialogues in the sense explained. The convenience of the description 'Socratic dialogues' should not generate the expectation of a single literary or philosophical enterprise in these writings. It conceals considerable variety, for example as between works devoted to articulating and defending the philosophical life and works which problematize Socratic thought as much as they exhibit its attractions. This distinction is not an exhaustive one, but provides useful categories for thinking about some of the key productions of Plato's early period.

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Moral, or indeed existential, choice, to use an anachronistic expression, is the insistent focus of Apology. God has appointed Socrates, as he represents it to his judges, to live the philosophical life, putting himself and others under constant examination. The consistency of his commitment to this mission requires him now to face death rather than abandon his practice of philosophy, as he supposes for the sake of argument the court might require him to do. For confronted with the choice between disobeying God (that is, giving up philosophy) and disobeying human dictate (that is, refusing to do so), he can only take the latter option. What governs his choice is justice:

It is a mistake to think that a man worth anything at all should make petty calculations about the risk of living or dying. There is only one thing for him to consider when he acts: whether he is doing right or wrong, whether he is doing what a good man or a bad man would do.
(Apology 28b)

Whether death is or is not a bad thing Socrates says he does not know. He does know that behaving wrongly and disobeying one's moral superior - whether divine or human - is bad and shameful. The demands of justice, as his conscience (or 'divine sign') interpreted them, had earlier led him to choose the life of a private citizen, conversing only with individuals, rather than the political life: for justice and survival in politics are incompatible. When he did carry out the public obligations of a citizen and temporarily held office, justice again compelled him to choose the dangerous and unpopular course of resisting a proposal that was politically expedient but contrary to the law. As for those with whom he talked philosophy, they too faced a choice: whether to make their main concern possessions and the body, or virtue and the soul; that is, what belongs to oneself, or oneself. And now the judges too must choose and determine what is just as their oath requires of them.

Crito and Gorgias continue the theme in different ways. Crito has often been found difficult to reconcile with Apology when it argues on various grounds (paternalistic and quasi-contractual) that citizens must always obey the law, unless they can persuade it that it is in the wrong. Hence, since the law requires that Socrates submit to the punishment prescribed by the court, he must accept the sentence of death pronounced on him. The higher authority of divine command stressed in Apology seems to have been forgotten. Once again, however, the whole argument turns on appeal to justice and to the choices it dictates: we must heed the truth about it, not what popular opinion says; we must decide whether or not we believe the radical Socratic proposition that retaliation against injury or injustice is never right (see Socrates §4).

Gorgias, one of the longest of all the dialogues, ranges over a wide territory, but at its heart is the presentation of a choice. Socrates addresses Callicles, in whose rhetoric Nietzsche saw an anticipation of his ideal of the superman:

You see that the subject of our arguments - and on what subject should a person of even small intelligence be more serious? - is this: what kind of life should we live? The life which you are now urging upon me, behaving as a man should: speaking in the assembly and practising rhetoric and engaging in politics in your present style? Or the life of philosophy?
(Gorgias 500c)

The dialogue devotes enormous energy to arguing that only philosophy, not rhetoric, can equip us with a true expertise which will give us real power, that is power to achieve what we want: the real not the apparent good. Only philosophy can articulate a rational and reliable conception of happiness - which turns out to depend on justice.

Grube, G. (1980) Plato's Thought, London: Athlone Press.(Accessible introductory account of Plato's thought, with new introduction and bibliography by D. Zeyl.)

Guthrie, W.K.C. (1975, 1978) A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4, Plato, The Man and his Dialogues: Earlier Period, vol. 5, The Later Plato and the Academy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(The Plato volumes of the most detailed and comprehensive English-language account of Greek philosophy; indispensable for bibliography and general orientation; volume 5 includes an assessment of the Tübingen school's interpretation of Plato.)

Irwin, T.H. (1995) Plato's Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.(A major philosophical study.)