PLATO

Plato

Plato

Introduction

Plato was the first ancient Greek political philosopher and indeed the first philosopher to leave a large and systematic body of work exploring the relationship between ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. His importance is such that Alfred North Whitehead famously described all European philosophy as a series of “footnotes to Plato” (1978, p. 39); he also founded the first prototype of the modern university, known as the Academy, where Aristotle studied under him (Taylor, 1964). He is often seen as the founder of utopianism, though the word was invented by the sixteenth-century humanist and Platonist Thomas more, and so it is in precise ...