Platon

Ancient Greek Philosopher and Founder of Western Thought (MÖ 428/427 - MÖ 348/347)

Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family, initially pursuing poetry and politics in his youth. His encounter with Socrates proved a life-altering turning point; profoundly affected by his teacher's execution, he turned away from political life toward philosophy. Following this tragic event, he embarked on extensive travels encompassing Egypt, Cyrene, and notably the Pythagorean circles of Southern Italy, journeys which fundamentally shaped his thought concerning mathematics, mysticism, and political theory. Around 387 BC, he founded his school, the Academy, within an olive grove near Athens; this institution became the first systematic center of higher learning in the Western world, establishing itself as a nexus for education in mathematics and dialectic. His aristocratic lineage and early political ambitions, decisively redirected by Socratic influence and Mediterranean intellectual pilgrimages, provided the unique crucible from which his philosophical system emerged, forever altering the trajectory of Western thought.Plato articulated his philosophical doctrines primarily through written dialogues, often employing Socrates as the principal interlocutor; among these foundational texts are the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Laws. The core of his philosophy resides in the theory of transcendent, eternal, and perfect 'Ideas' or 'Forms', a realm existing above and beyond the transient world of sensible objects. This vision, famously crystallized in the 'Allegory of the Cave', provides a radical account concerning the source of knowledge and the nature of reality. Within moral and political philosophy, he developed a conception of virtue based on harmony among the three parts of the soul—reason, spirit, and appetite—and advanced a model of the just state governed by philosopher-kings, thereby intertwining ethics, psychology, and political theory into a cohesive metaphysical framework aimed at both individual and societal perfection.The Academy founded by Plato remained operational for nearly nine centuries, educating thinkers such as Aristotle and laying the cornerstone for the Western philosophical tradition. It exerted a profound and enduring influence on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish medieval thought, particularly through philosophers like Augustine and al-Farabi. Its rediscovery from the Renaissance onward contributed significantly to the development of modern scientific and mathematical philosophy. Even today, debates within metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory frequently take shape as responses to or refutations of the questions and concepts first posited by Plato, whose dialogues continue to serve as the indispensable starting point for philosophical inquiry across diverse cultures and epochs, securing his legacy as the foundational figure from whom all subsequent Western philosophy descends.

Platon — alıntılar

• “I shall assume that your silence gives consent .”
• “No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.”
• “Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
• “Perception and knowledge could never be the same.”
• “I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.”
• “No one should be discouraged, Theaetetus, who can make constant progress, even though it be slow.”
• “It is difficult to set forth any of the greater ideas, except by the use of examples; for it would seem that each of us knows everything that he knows as if in a dream and then again, when he is as it were awake, knows nothing of it all.”
• “No multitude is able to acquire any art whatsoever. Then if there is a kingly art, neither the collective body of the wealthy nor the whole people could ever acquire this science of statesmanship.”
• “Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong … And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.”
• “Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.”
• “The orators — and the despots — have the least power in their cities … since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.”
• “It would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”
• “Knowledge is the food of the soul ; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.”
• “The wisdom which knows what are and are not dangers is opposed to the ignorance of them”
• “Μίμησιν μὲν γὰρ δὴ καὶ ἀπεικασίαν τὰ παρὰ πάντων ἡμῶν ῥηθέντα χρεών που γενέσθαι.”
• “ἐπ᾽ εὐτυχίᾳ τῇ μεγίστῃ παρὰ θεῶν ἡ τοιαύτη μανία [sc. ὁ ἔρως] δίδοται”
• “Neither human wisdom nor divine inspiration can confer upon man any greater blessing than this [live a life of happiness and harmony here on earth].”
• “Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life.”
• “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”
• “Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”
• “to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.”
• “The beginning in every task is the chief thing.”
• “There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.”
• “Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?”
• “Moreover, there is a victory and defeat—the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats—which each man gains or sustains at the hands, not of another, but of himself; this shows that there is a war against ourselves going on within every one of us.”
• “My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.”
• “As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you.”
• “You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way.”
• “[Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato…. He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, " Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched."”
• “Magic consists of, and is acquired by the worship of the gods.”

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