Republic
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Submitted by dshort4721 on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Republic
Plato
Comprehending Plato would involve a knowledge of his beginnings and learning influences as well as his most important work "The Republic" and his vision of the cave. Plato was one of the most important students of Socrates and where he was the founder of the university where students read the Socratic dialogues that Plato had written (Williams 51).
Born probably in Athens from the time of 429-427 B.C. possibly in Aegina. Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family. He met his teacher Socrates around 407 B.C. After Socrates execution in 399, Plato went with other Socratic disciples to Megara, where he traveled for ten years visiting Egypt, Sicily. When h returned he began teaching pupils near the grove of Academus outside of Athens, and continued until his death in 347 B.C(Palmer 95).
With out the work of Plato, Western thinking would be very different. No single influence has been greater, in every age and in every philosophic field. Even those thinkers who have rejected Plato's views have found themselves working to an agenda he set. The philosopher himself has not helped in his philosophies. At times he can be difficult, and at other times quite simple. Plato can be an elusive thinker and his meanings hard to pin down (Clegg 254). His dialogues are complex and do not simply expand his views, which in any case changed and developed over a long life.
Plato was the first philosopher whose works have come down to us complete. He is also the first to have written on the full range of philosophical questions: knowledge, perception , politics, ethics, art; language and its relations on the world; death, immortality and the nature of the mind; necessity, and the underlying order of things. A.N. Whitehead said that the European philosophical tradition consisted of "a series of footnotes to Plato"(Williams 72).
Plato never appears in his dialogues himself. In most of them, a major part is taken by the figure...
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