Plato

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period, founder of the Academy in Athens, and author of a body of philosophical dialogues that has remained continuously read for nearly twenty-four centuries. His works include The Republic, Phaedo, Symposium, Timaeus, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Laws, and the dialogues set out positions on metaphysics, ethics, politics, language, and education that frame much of subsequent Western philosophy.

He was born around 428 BC into an aristocratic Athenian family with political connections to both the democratic and oligarchic factions of the late fifth century. As a young man he became associated with Socrates, whose conversations and trial in 399 BC are reconstructed in his early dialogues, and Socrates' execution under the restored democracy turned him decisively away from a political career.

After travels in southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean mathematics and the court of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, he founded the Academy on land outside Athens around 387 BC. The school combined research in mathematics and philosophy with training of students who included Aristotle, who studied there for roughly twenty years.

His later dialogues, especially Sophist, Statesman, and Laws, show a more austere and self-critical engagement with the theory of Forms developed in his earlier work. He died in Athens around 348 BC, and the Academy continued in various forms until its closure under the emperor Justinian in 529 AD.

The forename Plato is an English-language rendering of the Greek Platōn, traditionally derived from the adjective platus, meaning broad, said by ancient biographers to refer either to the breadth of his shoulders, his forehead, or his style. His birth name is reported as Aristocles by some sources, and the philosopher's nickname is the form by which his work has reached every later language of European philosophy.