Plato
427-348? B.C.
Greek Philosopher
Although Plato himself did not contribute substantial works directly to science and mathematics, his philosophy and methods of education heavily influenced developments in these fields for many centuries. Many of his ideas were taken from earlier Greek philosophers, especially Socrates (470-399 B.C.). However, Plato was the first to produce a large body of writing that covered the major aspects of philosophy discussed today.
Plato was born into an upper-class family in Athens at a time when the power of his home city was in decline. He fought in the Peloponnesian War (409-404 B.C.) against Sparta, and came to respect the Spartan system of rigid government and strict social rules which appeared to give them the power to defeat Athens. Plato seemed destined for a political career, but the corrupt politics of the age and the treatment given to his teacher Socrates led Plato to pursue philosophy instead. Socrates had been found guilty of corrupting Athenian youth and questioning the gods, for which crimes he was condemned to death. Disillusioned, Plato traveled to Egypt, Sicily, and Italy, where he learnt mathematics from the Pythagoreans, aristocratic fraternities whose main achievements lay in the fields of music, geometry, and astronomy. He returned to Athens around 387 B.C. and founded the Academy, a place of higher learning designed to instill in the elite youth of Athens the moral values Plato believed would make them better leaders.
Plato wanted to develop in philosophical subjects the certainty he found in mathematics. He hoped that the whole of science could be deduced from a few basic assumed truths, or axioms. With the ideas of Socrates as a starting point, Plato used the method of written dialogues to pursue answers to questions such as "What is courage?" and "What is justice?" Plato tried to explain the relationship between abstract ideas and their representations in the real world. For example, a line is a length with no width, but any line drawn will always have width. Plato imagined a realm of abstract ideas where the perfect, eternal, forms of all things existed. He used the analogy of being chained to the back of a cave, facing the wall, when all you can see of the objects in the cave are the shadows the objects make on the wall. Plato believed that the world was like a shadow of the perfect realm, which would contain items such as the perfect circle and the perfect dodecahedron (geometrical figure with 12 faces), but also the perfect dog, horse, man, and the perfect courage and justice.
Plato's ideas suffered from the reinterpretations of later writers. For example, Plotinus (A.D. 204?-270) altered the central ideas of Plato's ideas to suit his own beliefs, creating a new philosophy later called Neoplatonism. Plato's pupil Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was to have a greater impact on science than his teacher. Aristotle's work survived the alteration caused by copying, translation, and reinterpretation better than Plato's. Arab thinkers, medieval scholars, and theologians had ready access to Aristotle and found his ideas fitted their own biases, or could be modified to do so. Plato's works were rediscovered during the Renaissance in Europe, when Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas influenced many thinkers such as Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and others. In the seventeenth century, so many scholars of Cambridge University were so influenced by Plato's ideas that they became known as the Cambridge Platonists.
Plato wrote about art, music, poetry, drama, dance, architecture, ethics, metaphysics, the ideal form of government, and the nature of reality. He lived to be about 80, and the Academy he founded in Athens continued until A.D. 529. Plato contributed little to what we would call scientific subjects, but his ideas on education and what constituted knowledge inspired his followers to explore the world in new ways. His stress on mathematics and philosophy, and his insistence on defining terms rather than trusting intuition, influenced many later thinkers.
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