![]() ![]() Instead, he wants to lead us - like Socrates - to discovering the truth for ourselves. And this is why the dialogue form is so important to him. Plato takes this idea of philosophy as midwifery seriously. Socrates claims he does not instruct, he simply assists in this process of developing wisdom, something that we must all undergo individually. But giving birth to wisdom is not something that Socrates can do for other people. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates describes himself as a midwife who assists at the birth of truth, providing precisely the kind of encouragement, the right salves and potions, to help the people he is speaking to give birth to true knowledge, or perhaps even to wisdom. Often, the main speaker in Plato’s dialogues is Socrates - or an idealised version of Socrates who seems to have a fitting response (although not always an answer) to every question, and an uncanny ability to tie everybody else up in knots. When you read Plato, what you are getting is a sense of thinking in action. Instead, he wants to give us a record of philosophy as an activity - as an exploration of things that matter, undertaken by living, thinking human beings. What Plato wants to give us in his work is not philosophy as a set of ideas. Plato’s philosophical ventriloquism gives his philosophy a very distinctive feel: he is not just telling us how things are instead, he is showing us how people come together and engage in debate in an attempt to get closer to the truth. Plato continued to teach until his death, in his early or mid-eighties. One of the most famous of his students was Aristotle, who later went on to develop - and fiercely criticise - his teacher’s work. After his return, he set up a philosophical school of his own, the Academy. Plato returned from his travels to settle in Athens when he was around forty years old. And the references to Egypt throughout his work suggest that, whether or not Plato visited Africa, he was influenced by Egyptian traditions of philosophy that reached back centuries. He was influenced by the Pythagorean philosophers, by Parmenides, and by Heraclitus. And he remained a part of Socrates’s circle until his mentor was put to death in 399 BCE.Īfter this, it is likely that Plato left Athens, and travelled throughout the Greek-speaking world, and perhaps as far as Egypt. When he was still young, Plato fell under the spell of Socrates. ![]() And this ventriloquism has led to centuries of debate about which ideas belong to Plato, which to Socrates, and which to the other participants in his dialogues. This makes Plato something of a ventriloquist-philosopher: in his dialogues, he channels his ideas through the mouths of others - most of all, his teacher Socrates. But where Parmenides and Xenophanes wrote in verse, Plato’s preferred form was dialogue. Like many other philosophers in Ancient Greece, Plato wrote his philosophical works in a literary form. ![]() Plato’s family took particular pride in being related to the great statesman Solon who lived two centuries before, and who put in place the laws that underpinned Athenian democracy. Plato was born in Athens some time between 428 and 423 BCE to a high-ranking Athenian family.
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