Plato’s philosophy, presented through dialogues, includes ideas on moral virtue, government, and forms. He believed in Platonic realism, proposing the existence of abstract objects called forms which are the perfect and unchanging essences of all things. Plato also proposed the philosopher king concept for the best form of government.
The philosophy of Plato, who lived in Greece from about 428 to 348 BC, is enormously important and influential in the history of Western thought. Some of the most important elements in Plato’s philosophy include ideas on the nature of moral virtue, theories of the best form of government, and Plato’s theory of forms. The identification of Plato’s beliefs is complicated by the fact that Plato wrote mainly in the form of dialogues and Plato himself never appears as a character in any of them. Rather than simply setting forth a series of arguments, Plato presented his ideas in his writings by portraying conversations between two or more people, in which various ideas, arguments and counter-arguments would be presented. One of the characters in these dialogues is usually Socrates, Plato’s teacher, who was a prominent and influential figure, but left no written works of him.
Later philosophers and scholars have sometimes disagreed about which of the ideas appearing in Plato’s dialogues are Plato’s beliefs, presented through Socrates as a literary device, and which are beliefs held by the historical Socrates and reported but not necessarily endorsed by Plato. There are also disagreements as to whether some of the ideas in Plato’s works, such as the description of an ideal city ruled by philosopher kings in the Republic, were meant literally.
A well-known aspect of Plato’s philosophy is the idea of forms, which Plato put forward as an explanation of the nature of universals. A universal is a feature that can be present in several particular objects at the same time. For example, a red fire hydrant, red blood, and a red bird are particular objects that share the quality of redness, which is universal. A common philosophical question, called the problem of universals, is whether universals are real entities and what their nature is, if they are.
Plato believed that universals exist and have an existence beyond the particular objects that possess them, a position often called Platonic realism. It runs counter to the belief called nominalism that only particular objects exist and the belief that universals exist as real entities, but that their existence depends on the existence of particular objects that have them, a position commonly called Aristotelian realism.
To explain the nature of universals, Plato proposed the idea of abstract objects called forms which are the perfect and unchanging essences of all particular and concrete things. For example, all individual horses are instances of or participate in the form of the horse, and thus all share the same nature as horses despite being unique individuals differing from each other in various other ways. Similarly, all red objects are reflections of the shape of red, all spherical objects are reflections of the shape of the sphere, and so on. This is true not only for physical characteristics, but also for more abstract concepts. Beautiful objects reflect the form of the beautiful, right actions reflect the form of the right, and so on.
Forms exist outside of time and space and can only be understood through reason rather than sensory observation. While having no physical existence, the forms in Plato’s philosophy are in an ultimate sense more real than particular objects, because every feature of any particular object is a reflection of the forms. Plato’s most famous expression of this idea appears in La Repubblica, in which he compares the world we perceive to the shadows cast on the wall of a cave by solid objects moving in front of a fire, shadows that most people, unaware of of the forms that underlie everything, mistake for reality.
Plato’s philosophy included his ideas on a large number of other topics, including ethics, human nature, and the nature and purpose of human activities such as art and rhetoric. In his dialogue The Republic, Plato proposes an analogy between the best form of government and the best ordering of the individual’s soul. He divided the individual soul into three parts or faculties: reason, appetites or desires, and spirit, which included such things as courage and willpower.
Plato believed that a just person is governed by reason, with the appetites and spirit subordinate to it. Likewise, he argued, the most just state was one governed by a small elite composed of those most governed by reason and wisdom ruling over those governed by appetites or the spirit. This is commonly referred to as the philosopher king concept. It is often disputed, however, whether Plato intended to advocate this as a real model or real government or whether he was only using it as a metaphor to describe his own ideas about the nature of a virtuous person.
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