Plato Sentence Examples
In 1867 and 1868 he was crowned by the Academy of Moral Science for his work on Plato and Socrates.
This is substantially the view set forth in the Timaeus of Plato (§ 7 1 c).
The image of Jesus was crowned along with those of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.
Ritchie, " that, in the various dialogues in which Plato speaks of immortality, the arguments seem to be of different kinds, and most of them quite unconnected with one another.
The new method of definition which Socrates applied to problems of human conduct was extended by Plato to the whole universe of the knowable.
The man who inspired Plato deserves that name.
Plato advocated them, and perhaps the later Jews imitated the Spartan community.
In Plato (Charmides, 158 B) he is mentioned with Abaris as skilled in the arts of incantation.
In Plato's thought the belief held a prominent position.
If we answer " Yes " to that question, we pass on from intuitionalism to idealism - an idealism not on the lines of Berkeley (matter does not exist) but of Plato (things A obey an ascertainable rational necessity).
AdvertisementMendelssohn's Phaedo, on the immortality of the soul, brought the author into immediate fame, and the simple home of the " Jewish Plato " was sought by many of the leaders of Gentile society in Berlin.
He was not taught to compose either in Latin or in Greek, and he was never an exact scholar; it was for the subject matter that he was required to read, and by the age of ten he could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease.
But he is chiefly memorable for having introduced Plato to the Western world.
All these solutions were condemned by Plato on the ground that they were mechanical and not geometrical, i.e.
Fairbairn, " Plato's arguments for immortality, isolated, modernized, may be feeble, even valueless, but allowed to stand where and as he himself puts them, they have an altogether different worth.
AdvertisementHe adds a reason that recalls one of Plato's, " As manifestly as the human soul is by means of the senses linked to the present life, so manifestly it attaches itself by reason, and the conceptions, conclusions, anticipations and efforts to which reason leads it, to God and eternity."
The attitude of Paul toward glossolaly among his converts strikingly resembles Plato's opinion as expressed in the Timaeus, p. 72, of the enthusiastic ecstasies of the ancient µav ns (soothsayer).
With Epiphanes, his son, he was the leader of a philosophic school basing its theories mainly upon Platonism, and striving to amalgamate Plato's Republic with the Christian ideal of human brotherhood.
Those Ideas according to which all reality is objectively shaped - and therefore too, as a modern would add, subjectively construed - include the idea of the Good, which Plato identifies with God.
Hence there are tendencies even in Plato to build up the ideal world in sharp contrast to the actual world - to the half interpenetrated or half tamed world of matter.
AdvertisementAristotle has impressed the ordinary mind chiefly by his criticism of Plato's ideal theory; and therefore he is often ranked as the father of empiricists.
Aristotle is much nearer a conception of evolution than his master Plato.
Other ancient writers, however, speak of his visit to the underworld; according to Plato, the infernal gods only " presented an apparition" of Eurydice to him.
He formed a comprehensive theory of the variations of climate with latitude and season, and was convinced of the necessity of a circulation of water between the sea and rivers, though, like Plato, he held that this took place by water rising from the sea through crevices in the rocks, losing it .s dissolved salts in the process.
Thus it is quite in accordance with the outlook of the classical period that Plato in his Laws (909-910) should prohibit all possession of private shrines or performance of private rites; "let a man go to a temple to pray, and let any one who pleases join with him in the prayer."
AdvertisementHe formed the resolution to translate all the works of Aristotle and all the dialogues of Plato, and to reconcile the philosophy of Plato with that of Aristotle.
Gibbon justly describes it as " a golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully, but which claims incomparable merit from the barbarism of the times and the situation of the author."
Whereas Plato's main problem had been the organization of the perfect state, and Aristotle's intellect had ranged with fresh interest over all departments of the knowable, political speculation had become a mockery with the extinction of free political life, and knowledge as such had lost its freshness for the Greeks of the Roman Empire.
Neoplatonism owes its form to Plato, but its underlying motive is the widespread feeling of self-despair and the longing for divine illumination characteristic of the age in which it appears.
In Philo, Alexandrian Judaism had already seized upon Plato as " the Attic Moses," and done its best to combine his speculations with the teaching of his Jewish prototype.
The One, the Good, and the Idea of the Good were identical in Plato's mind, and the Good was therefore not deprived of intelligible essence.
On this subject Henry is far from clear; but he defends Plato against the current Aristotelian criticism, and endeavours to show that the two views are in harmony.
Like Plato, the elder Mill would have put poets under ban as enemies of truth, and he subordinated private to public affections.
The ten books of Stromata (in which Origen compared the teaching of the Christians with that of the philosophers, and corroborated all the Christian dogmas from Plato, Aristotle, Numenius and Cornutus) have all perished, with the exception of small fragments; so have the tractates on the resurrection and on freewill.2 6.
He changed his name from Gemistus to the equivalent Pletho ("the full"), perhaps owing to the similarity of sound between that name and that of his master Plato.
Cardinal Bessarion became his disciple; he produced a great impression upon Cosimo de' Medici; and though not himself making any very important contribution to the study of Plato, he effectually shook the exclusive domination which Aristotle had exercised overEuropean thought for eight centuries.
From the grammar-school (Johanneum) he passed to the gymnasium, where the study of Plato appears especially to have engrossed him.
Archytas may be quoted as an example of Plato's perfect ruler, the philosopher-king, who combines practical sagacity with high character and philosophic insight.
His taste, however, was curious; he preferred Cato the elder, Ennius and Caelius Antipater to Cicero, Virgil and Sallust, the obscure poet Antimachus to Homer and Plato.
The Greek ecclesiastes means one who takes part in the deliberations of an assembly (ecclesia), a debater or speaker in an assembly (Plato, Gorgias, 452 E), and this is the general sense of the Hebrew word.
It is more likely that he heard one of Plato's followers, inasmuch as Plato died when he was only four years old, if the above dates are correct.
Metrodorus held that Carneades was in reality a loyal follower of Plato.
Plato condemned the practice, which the theory of Aristotle also by implication sets aside as inadmissible, of Greeks having Greeks for slaves.
Before he had begun to learn Greek, Marsilio entered upon the task of studying and elucidating Plato.
Seven years later he felt himself a sufficiently ripe Greek scholar to begin the translation of Plato, by which his name is famous in the history of scholarship, and which is still the best translation of that author Italy can boast.
As an exponent of Plato he suffered from the fatal error of confounding Plato with the later Platonists.
The transition from this point of view to an almost superstitious adoration of Plato was natural; and Ficino, we know, joined in the hymns and celebrations with which the Florentine Academy honoured their great master on the day of his birth and death.
Cosimo he called his second father, saying that Ficino had given him life, but Cosimo new birth, - the one had devoted him to Galen, the other to the divine Plato, - the one was physician of the body, the other of the soul.
Besides the works already noticed, Ficino composed a treatise on the Christian religion, which was first given to the world in 1476, a translation into Italian of Dante's De monarchia, a life of Plato, and numerous essays on ethical and semi-philosophical subjects.
Plato was Moses atticizing.
Clement varies in his statement how Plato got his wisdom or his fragments of the Reason.
Sometimes he thinks that they came direct from God, like all good things, but he is also fond of maintaining that many of Plato's best thoughts were borrowed from the Hebrew prophets; and he makes the same statement in regard to the wisdom of the other philosophers.
Whether Plato understood these forms as actually existent apart from all the particular examples, or as being of the nature of immutable physical laws, is matter of discussion.
It is true that several of the Neoplatonists professed to accept all the teaching both of Plato and of Aristotle, whereas, in fact, they arbitrarily interpreted Aristotle so as to make him agree with Plato, and Plato so as to make his teachings consistent with the Oriental doctrines which they had adopted, in the same manner as the schoolmen attempted to reconcile Aristotle with the doctrines of the church.
And Chronological Notes The most conspicuous property of the lodestone, its attraction for iron, appears to have been familiar to the Greeks at least as early as 800 B.C., and is mentioned by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and others.
His De magnete magneticisque corporibus et de magno magnete tellure physiologia nova (1600), contains many references to the expositions of earlier writers from Plato down to those of the author's own age.
Nois in Plato and Aristotle is used both widely for all the meanings which "reason" can have, and strictly for the faculty which apprehends intuitively.
In his philosophy he was mainly concerned to defend Plato against the followers of Aristotle.
In translations they had only the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle in the versions of Boetius, the Timaeus of Plato in the version of Chalcidius, and Boetius's translation of Porphyry's Isagoge.
Boetius ends by declining to adjudicate between Plato and Aristotle, remarking in a semi-apologetic style that, if he has expounded Aristotle's opinion by preference, his course is justified by the fact that he is commenting upon an introduction to Aristotle.
Remigius is thus a Realist, not so much in the sense of Plato as in the spirit of Parmenides, and Haureau applies to this form of Realism Bayle's description of Realism in general as " le Spinosisme non developpe."
This thing, remaining essentially the same, receives in the same way other forms which constitute Plato and the other individuals of the species man; and, with the exception of those forms which mould that matter into the individual Socrates, there is nothing in Socrates that is not the same at the same time under the forms of Plato.
But if homo is wholly and essentially present in Socrates, then it is, as it were, absorbed in Socrates; where Socrates is not, it cannot be, consequently not in Plato and the other individua hominis.
But, since those universals, so far as they are called genera and species, cannot be perceived by any one in their purity without the admixture of imagination, Plato maintained that they existed and could be beheld beyond the things of sense, to wit, in the divine mind.
Bernard of Chartres, at the beginning of the 12th century, endeavoured, according to John of Salisbury, to reconcile Plato and Aristotle; but his doctrine is almost wholly derived from the former through St Augustine and the commentary of Chalcidius.
Like his master, he defended Plato - or what he considered to be the Platonic theory - against the attacks of Aristotle.
The universals, therefore, have no existence, as universals, in rerum natura; and Thomas endorses, in this sense, the polemic of Aristotle against Plato's hypostatized abstractions.
Amongst the ablest and most zealous students of the history of philosophy are Bernhard Alexander, under whose editorship, aided by Joseph Banoczi, a series of the works of the world's great thinkers has appeared; Andrew Domanovszky, author of an elaborate History of Philosophy; Julius Gyomlai, translator of Plato; Eugen Peterfy, likewise translator of philosophical works, &c.
He entered into an elaborate defence of individual property against Plato and More, rather perhaps because the scheme of his work required the treatment of that theme than because it was practically urgent in his day, when the excesses of the Anabaptists had produced a strong feeling against communistic doctrines.
He was the author of an 'Eirvro o' TWv HX aTcwos Soy s6TC.wv, an analysis of Plato's philosophy according to later writers.
He produced in the end a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle with an admixture of Pythagorean or Oriental mysticism, and is closely allied to the Alexandrian school of thought.
At Turin he resumed his philosophic studies and his translation of Plato, but in 1858 refused a professorship of Greek at Pavia, under the Austrian government, only to accept it in 1859 from the Italian government after the liberation of Lombardy.
The Platonic testimony, if it proved anything, would prove too much, namely, that the doctrine of the unity of Being originated, not with Xenophanes, but before him; and, in fact, the passage from the Sophist no more proves that Plato attributed to Xenophanes the philosophy of Parmenides than Theaetetus, 160 D, proves that Plato attributed to Homer the philosophy of Heraclitus.
Like Socrates, he was not a philosopher, and did not pretend to be one; but, as the reasoned scepticism of Socrates cleared the way for the philosophy of Plato, so did Xenophanes's "abnormis sapientia" for the philosophy of Parmenides.
A remarkable man now comes to the front - Dion, the friend and disciple of Plato - and for a time the trusted political adviser of his nephew Dionysius.
Dion's idea seems to have been to make Dionysius something like a constitutional sovereign, and with this view he brought him into contact with Plato.
From the time of Plato medicine has been accused of ministering to the survival of unfit persons, and to their propagation of children.
Foremost among these were the writings of Epicurus; but he had also an intimate knowledge of the philosophical poem of Empedocles, and at least an acquaintance with the works of Democritus, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Plato and the Stoical writers.
His admiration for Plato led him to write a commentary on the Timaeus; in another way it is shown by important modifications which he made in psychological doctrine.
Dinostratus, a Greek geometer and disciple of Plato, discussed the curve, and showed how it effected a mechanical solution of squaring the circle.
According to Plato (Prot., 318 E), he endeavoured to communicate "prudence" (6130vXia) to his pupils, "which should fit them to manage their households, and to take part by word and deed in civic affairs."
In addition to persons of high rank, poets, legendary and others (Linus, Orpheus, Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles), legislators and physicians (Lycurgus, Hippocrates), the patrons of various trades or handicrafts (artists, cooks, bakers, potters), the heads of philosophical schools (Plato, Democritus, Epicurus) received the honours of a cult.
Comte thought almost as meanly of Plato as he did of Saint-Simon, and he considered Aristotle the prince of all true thinkers; yet their vital difference about Ideas did not prevent Aristotle from calling Plato master.
To Kant's lectures and conversations he further owed something of his large interest in cosmological and anthropological problems. Among the writers whom he most carefully read were Plato, Hume, Shaftesbury, Leibnitz, Diderot and Rousseau.
Plato, whose philosophy was strongly opposed to the evolution theory, distinctly inclines to the emanation idea in his doctrine that each particular thing is what it is in virtue of a pre-existent idea, and that the particulars are the lowest in the scale of existence, at the head of, or above, which is the idea of the good.
It is impossible to trace directly the influence exercised upon him by the great men of his time, but one cannot fail to connect his emancipation of medicine from superstition with the widespread power exercised over Greek life and thought by the living work of Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides.
They were written in pithy and popular language, full of proverbs and colloquialisms. Plato is said to have introduced them into Athens and to have made use of them in his dialogues; according to Suidas, they were Plato's constant companions, and he even slept with them under his pillow.
As regards his intellectual attainments we may set Julius Hare's verdict "the greatest mind since Plato" over against Ruskin's "by nature puzzle-headed and indeed wrong-headed."
The Sophists and the Sceptics, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans took up the question, and from the time of Locke and Kant it has been prominent in modern philosophy.
He went to the schools of philosophy, and heard lectures on Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus and Carneades; the conjunction of names show how philosophy had become a dead tradition.
He was a fellow-pupil of Polemo in the school of Xenocrates at Athens, and was the first commentator on Plato.
On the expulsion of the younger Dionysius, he returned to Athens, and, finding it impossible to profess philosophy publicly owing to the contempt of Plato and Aristotle, was compelled to teach privately.
Plato (Rep. x.) embodies the idea in one of his finest myths.
It is pretty clear that the common accounts of the Renaissance and of the revival of learning grossly exaggerate the influence of the writers of Greece and Rome, for they produced no obvious rationalistic movement, as would have been the case had Plato and Cicero, Lucretius and Lucian, been taken really seriously.
Plato extended the Socratic discovery to the whole of reality and while seeking to see the pre-Socratics with the eyes of Socrates sought " to see Socrates with the.
Accordingly Plato conceived of them as forming a system and finding their reality in the degree in which they embody the one all-embracing idea and conceived of not under the form of an efficient but of a final cause, an inner principle of action or tendency in things to realize the fullness of their own nature which in the last resort was identical with the nature of the whole.
This Plato expressed in the myth of the Sun, but the garment of mythology in which Plato clothed his idealism, beautiful as it is in itself and full of suggestion, covered an essential weakness.
But idealism has insisted from the time of Plato on the distinction between what is actual in time and space and the reality that can only partially be revealed in it.
Hence Plato in the Sophist describes the Megarians as "the friends of ideas."
They spent their energy in attacking Plato and Aristotle, and hence earned the opprobrious epithet of Eristic. They used their dialectic subtlety to disprove the possibility of motion and decay; unity is the negation of change, increase and decrease, birth and death.
He was then recalled by the younger Dionysius, whom he persuaded to dismiss Plato and Dion.
The error was discovered, and the Delians applied to Plato for his advice, and Plato referred them to Eudoxus.
This story is mere fable, for the problem is far older than Plato.
However, no proper geometrical solution, in Plato's sense, was obtained; in fact it is now generally agreed that, with such a restriction, the problem is insoluble.
Sovereignty is used in a further sense when Plato and Aristotle speak of the sovereignty of the laws (Laws, 4.715; Politics, 4.4; 3.15).
It must, however, be admitted that much of his knowledge was ill digested; it even appears that he regarded Plato and Speusippus as Stoics.
Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate " canon.
In the same century the study of Plato was represented by Synesius of Cyrene (c. 370-c. 41 3) and by the Neoplatonists of Alexandria and of Athens.
The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch's Lives, and, above all, Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.
At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the Nestorian Christians.
Plato was mainly represented by the Latin translation of the Timaeus.
This was partly due to the recovery of some of the lost works of ancient literature, and the transition from the middle ages to the revival of learning was attended by a general widening of the range of classical studies and by a renewed interest in Plato.
To the Latin transla tions of Aristotle and to his interpreters he refers in more than three hundred passages, while the number of his references to the Latin translation of the Timaeus of Plato is less than ten.
Another generation passed, and the scholars of the East and West met at the council of Florence (1439) One of the envoys of the Greeks, Gemistus Pletho, then inspired Cosimo dei Medici with the thought of founding an academy for the study of Plato.
The Greek authors were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the dramatists, with Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato, Isocrates and Demosthenes, Plutarch and Arrian.
In 1494-1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less than twenty-seven editiones principes of Greek authors and of Greek works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus.
In producing Plato, Athenaeus and Aristophanes, the scholar-printer was largely aided by Musurus, who also edited the Aldine Pausanias (1516) and the Etymologicum printed in Venice by another Greek immigrant, Callierges (1499) The Revival of Learning in Italy ends with the sack of Rome (1527).
Plato describes how certain Egyptian priests, in a conversation with Solon, represented the island as a country larger than Asia Minor and Libya united, and situated just beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar).
In the Critias Plato adds a history of the ideal commonwealth of Atlantis.
It is impossible to decide how far this legend is due to Plato's invention, and how far it is based on facts of which no record remains.
To Plato the "happiness" of all the members of a state, each according to his own capacity, was the final end of political development.
In general, his philosophy was a reaction against the sceptic or agnostic position of the Middle and New Academy in favour of the dogmatism of Plato.
Judged from the standpoint of empirical science, philosophy passed its meridian in Plato and Aristotle, declined in the post-Aristotelian systems, and set in the darkness of Neoplatonism.
The systems of Plato and Aristotle sought to adjust the rival claims of physics and ethics (although the supremacy of the latter was already acknowledged); but the popular religions were thrown overboard.
It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.
Thirdly, it can justly claim the honour of Plato's name, since it expressly goes back to him for its metaphysics, directly combating those of the Stoa.
This principle is not to be identified with the " idea " of Plato or with the " form " of Aristotle.
It must be added that the dependence of Basilides and Valentinus on Zeno and Plato is beyond dispute.
If Plato still remains the.
The most distinguished teachers at Athens were Plutarch (q.v.), his disciple Syrianus (who did important work as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, and further deserves mention for his vigorous defence of the freedom of the will), but above all Proclus (411-485).
They not only formed one of the bridges by which the medieval thinkers got back to Plato and Aristotle; they determined the scientific method of thirty generations, and they partly created and partly nourished the Christian mysticism of the middle ages.
Zoilus appears to have been at one time a follower of Isocrates, but subsequently a pupil of Polycrates, whom he heard at Athens, where he was a teacher of rhetoric. Zoilus was chiefly known for the acerbity of his attacks on Homer (which gained him the name of Homeromastix, "scourge of Homer"), chiefly directed against the fabulous element in the Homeric poems. Zoilus also wrote against Isocrates and Plato, who had attacked the style of Lysias of which he approved.
Throughout this mystic religious world it was above all the influence of the late Greek religion, derived from Plato, that also continued to operate; it is filled with the echo of the song, the first note of which was sounded by the Platonists, about the heavenly home of the soul and the homeward journey of the wise to the higher world of light.
An entirely different class of ideas, also termed animistic, is the belief in the world soul, held by Plato, Schelling and others.
He studied with earnest zeal the Greek philosophers; Plato in particular, and the writings of the Stoics, he had fully at command, and his treatise De Anima shows that he himself was able to investigate and discuss philosophical problems. From the philosophers he had been led to the medical writers, whose treatises plainly had a place in his working library.
In the archonship of Polyzelus (367-366), after the death of his father, in his eighteenth year, he came to Athens, and having joined Plato spent twenty years with him.
On the death of Plato (May 347) in the archonship of Theophilus (348-347) he departed to Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, and, after three years' stay, during the archonship of Eubulus (345-344) he moved to Mitylene, whence he went to Philip of Macedon in the archonship of Pythodotus (343-342), and spent eight years with him as tutor of Alexander.
He also attacked Isocrates, according to Cicero, and perhaps even set up a rival school of rhetoric. At any rate he had pupils of his own, such as Eudemus of Cyprus, Theodectes and Hermias, books of his own, especially dialogues, and even to some extent his own philosophy, while he was still a pupil of Plato.
Well grounded in his boyhood, and thoroughly educated in his manhood, Aristotle, after Plato's death, had the further advantage of travel in his third period, when he was in his prime.
The appointment of Plato's nephew, Speusippus, to succeed his uncle in the Academy induced Aristotle and Xenocrates to leave Athens together and repair to the court of Hermias.
The master and his scholars were called Peripatetics (ol Ert Tov 7reptlredrov), certainly from meeting, like other philosophical schools, in a walk (7repL7raros), and perhaps also, on the authority of Hermippus of Smyrna, from walking and talking there, like Protagora s s and his followers as described in Plato's Protagoras (314 E, 315 e).
Indeed, according to Ammonius, Plato too had talked as he walked in the Academy; and all his followers were called Peripatetics, until, while the pupils of Xenocrates took the name " Academics," those of Aristotle retained the general name.
So diametrical a difference could not have arisen at once_ For, though Aristotle was different from Plato, and brought with.
When Aristotle at the age of eighteen came to Athens, Plato, at the age of sixty-two, had probably written all his dialogues except the Laws; and in the course of the remaining twenty years of his life and teaching, he expounded " the socalled unwritten dogmas " in his lectures on the Good.
The creator, or the divine intellect, with a view to the form of the good, and taking all forms as models, creates in a receptacle (vir080x i, Plato, Timaeus, 49 A) individual impressions which are called things but really change and become without attaining the permanence of being.
Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things.
Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them (7rEpi Ta yaBoii), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his Metaphysics.
Modern critics, who were not present and knew neither, often accuse Aristotle of misrepresenting Plato.
What is more, both Speusippus and Xenocrates founded their own philosophies on this very Pythagoreanism of Plato.
Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato.
But with the written dialogues of Plato he always continued to agree almost as much as he disagreed.
Like Plato, he believed in real Universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom.
But what he refused to believe with Plato was that reality is not here, but only above; and what he maintained against Plato was that it is both, and that universals and forms, one and many, the good, are real but not separate realities.
A special interest attaches to the dialogues written after the manner of Plato but with Aristotle as principal interlocutor; and some of these, e.g.
Among the didactic writings, the 7rEpi TayaOoii would probably belong to the same time, because it was Aristotle's report of Plato's lectures.
On the whole, then, it seems as if Aristotle began with dialogues during his second period under Plato, but gradually came to prefer writing didactic works, especially in the third period after Plato's death, and in connexion with Alexander.
These early writings show clearly how Aristotle came to depart from Plato.
The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subjectmatter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit.
The Eudemus and Protrepticus are with Plato; the dialogues on Philosophy and the treatise on Forms are against Plato.
Plato's theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected Aristotle himself.
This strange, exotic, ascetic view was adopted by some philosophers, and especially by the Pythagoreans, and so transmitted to Plato.
Here we can read the young Aristotle, writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius.
Nothing could be more like Plato's Phaedo, or more unlike Aristotle's later work on the Soul, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next life to sink into the background.
Finally, in the spirit of Plato's Phaedo and the dialogue Eudemus, the Protrepticus holds that the soul is bound to the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of the De Anima is that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the necessary organ of the soul.
Accordingly in this dialogue he attacked Plato's fundamental position, both in its written and in its unwritten presentment, as a.
Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in Plato's lifetime, to oppose.
Plato's hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own.
Aristoxenus, at the beginning of the second book of the Harmonics,, gives a graphic account of the astonishment caused by these lectures, of Plato, and of their effect on the lectures of Aristotle.
From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were son, different, that their philosophies must diverge'; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards thenatural, the substantial, the scientific.
Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato, was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics.
After Plato's death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes.
Still more marked was his departure from Plato as regards rhetoric. Plato in the Gorgias, (501 A) had contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice (rpt/37) KaL Epirecpia); Aristotle in the Gryllus (Fragm.
On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics.
After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions.
He was really, as we have seen, a prolific writer from the time when he was a young man under Plato's guidance at Athens; beginning with dialogues in the manner of his master, but afterwards preferring to write didactic works during the prime of his own life between thirty-eight and fifty (347-335-334), and with the further advantage of leisure at Atarneus and Mitylene, in Macedonia and at home in Stagira.
Finally he died without completing some of his works, such as the Politics, and notably that work of his whole philosophic career and foundation of his whole philosophy - the Metaphysics - which, projected in his early criticism of Plato's philosophy of universal forms, gradually developed into his positive philosophy of individual substances, but remained unfinished after all.
To put one extreme case, about the soul he could think at first in the Eudemus like Plato that it is imprisoned in the body, and long afterwards in the De Anima like himself that it is the immateriate essence of the material bodily organism.
With them came philosophical poems, such as those of Xenophanes and Empedocles; the epical history of Herodotus; the dramatic philosophy of Plato.
As to the fragments, we are safe in saying that the early dialogues in the manner of Plato were written under the influence of Plato, and that the subsequent didactic writings connected with Alexander were written more under the influence of Philip and Alexander.
Turning to the extant writings, we find that some are more under the influence of Plato, while others are more original and Aristotelian.
In brief then the common ground of the Categories and the Metaphysics is the fundamental position that all things are substances having belonging to them universals and attributes, which have no separate being as Plato falsely supposed.
We have seen how anxious Aristotle was to be considered one of the Platonists, how reluctant he was to depart from Plato's hypothesis of forms, and how, in denying the separability, he retained the Platonic belief in the reality and even in the unity of the universal.
The first difference then between the Categories and the Metaphysics is in the nature of an attribute; and the theory of inherence in the Categories is nearer to Plato and more rudimentary than the theory of predication in the Metaphysics.
The second difference is still nearer to Plato and more rudimentary, and is in the nature of substance.
The question then arises, what sort of substance can be predicate; and in the Categories Aristotle gave an answer, which would have been impossible, if he had not, under Plato's influence, accepted both the unity and the substantiality of the universal.
The only logical conclusion is that the Categories, being nearer to Plato on the nature of attributes, and still nearer on the relation of universals to substances, is earlier than the Metaphysics.
But this lapse only shows how powerful a dominion Plato exercised over Aristotle's soul to the last; for it arises out of the pupil still accepting from hiAmaster the unity of the universal though now applying it, not to classes, but to essences.
But in spite of this great logical achievement, he continued throughout the discourse to accept Plato's grammatical analysis of all sentences into noun and verb, which indeed applies to the proposition as a sentence but does not give its particular elements.
It is nearer to Plato's analysis of the sentence, and no logician would have gone back to it, after the Prior Analytics.
At first he adopted the somewhat ascetic views of his master about soul and body, and about goods of body and estate; but before Plato's death he had rejected the hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the form of the good identified with the one, by which Plato tried to explain moral phenomena; while his studies and teaching on rhetoric and poetry soon began to make him take a more tolerant view than Plato did of men's passions.
Throughout his whole subsequent life, however, he retained the fundamental doctrine, which he had learnt from Plato, and Plato from Socrates, that virtue is essential to happiness.
Moreover, the successors of Plato in the Academy, Speusippus and Xenocrates, showed the same belief in the essentiality of virtue.
It is probable that when, after Plato's death and the accession of Speusippus in 347, Aristotle with Xenocrates left Athens to visit his former pupil Hermias, the three discussed this moderate system of Ethics in which the two philosophers nearly agreed.
The good of Ethics is human good; and human good is happiness, not the universal good or form of the good to which Plato subordinated human happiness.
After this, it can never be said that the earlier books of the Eudemian Ethics are so good a preparation as those of the Nicomachean Ethics for the distinction between prudence (Opov j ats) and wisdom (a001a), which is the main point of the common books, and one of Aristotle's main points against Plato's philosophy.
Meanwhile, however, the truth about the Eudemian Ethics in general is that it was an earlier rudimentary sketch written by Aristotle, when he was still struggling, without quite succeeding, to get over Plato's view that there is one philosophical knowledge of universal good, by which not only the dialectician and mathematician must explain the being and becoming of the world, but also the individual and the statesman guide the life of man.
Secondly, the Eudemian Ethics, while not agreeing with Plato's Republic that the just can be happy by justice alone, does not assign to the external goods of good fortune (Eutu X ia) the prominence accorded to them in the Nicomachean Ethics as the necessary conditions of all virtue, and the instruments of moral virtue.
The opposition of divine good fortune according to impulse to that which is contrary to impulse reminds us of Plato's point in the Phaedrus that there is a divine as well as a diseased madness.
Because, then, it is very like, but more rudimentary and more Platonic, we conclude that the Eudemian is an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics, written by Aristotle when he was still in process of transition from Plato's ethics to his own.
It has another characteristic which points to its being an early work of Aristotle, when he was still under the influence of Plato's style; namely its approximation to dialogue.
No doubt, rational evidences had appeared in books of rhetoric, as we see from Plato's Phaedrus, 266-267,where we find proofs,probabilities, refutation and maxim, but mixed up with other evidences.
The truth is that the Metaphysics both precedes and follows the Physics, because it had been all along occupying Aristotle ever since he began to differ from Plato's metaphysical views and indeed forms a kind of presupposed basis of his whole system.
Plato and Speusippus in the Ethics, Eudoxus and Callippus in the Metaphysics, he was writing these passages after the deaths of these persons; but he might have been also writing the Ethics and the Metaphysics both beforehand and afterwards.
The reason is that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician half for and half against Plato, occupied himself with metaphysics all his philosophical life, made the science of things the universal basis of all sciences without destroying their independence, and so gradually brought round philosophy from universal forms to individual substances.
Beyond knowledge lies opinion, beyond discovery disputation, beyond philosophy and science dialectic between man and man, which was much practised by the Greeks in the dialogues of Socrates, Plato, the Megarians and Aristotle himself in his early manhood.
With Plato, who thought that the interrogation of man is the best instrument of truth, dialectic was exaggerated into a universal science of everything that is.
Aristotle was the founder of Logic; because, though others, and especially Plato, had made occasional remarks about reason (X yos), Aristotle was the first to conceive it as a definite subject of investigation.
On the whole, the interpretation which best suits all the passages is that extraneous discourses mean any extra-scientific dialectical discussions, oral or written, occurring in dialogues by Plato, or by Aristotle, or by anybody else, or in ordinary conversation, on any subject under the sun.
There are then no separate universal forms, as Plato supposed.
So can we men, not, as Plato thought, by having in our souls universal principles innate but forgotten, but by acquiring universal principles from sense, which is the origin of knowledge, arrive at judgments which are true, and true because they agree with the things which we know by sense, by inference and by science.
Grote indeed intended to write a general account of Aristotle like that of Plato; but his Aristotle went little further than the logical writings.
The Timaeus of Plato in the Latin version of Chalcidius was known to him as to his contemporaries and predecessors, and probably he had access to translations of the Phaedo and Meno.
In More's house you would see that Plato's Academy was revived again, only, whereas in the Academy the discussions turned upon geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a veritable school of Christian religion.
Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle; Telesio, Bruno and Campanella; Leibnitz; the idealists, Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Fechner and Paulsen; and the materialist, Haeckel - all have agreed in according some sort of appetition to Nature.
Of this view the part which was not Aristotle's, the state of " universalia ante rem," was due to the Neoplatonists, who interpreted the " separate forms " of Plato to be ideas in intellect, and handed down their interpretation through St Augustine to the medieval Realists like Aquinas, who thus combined Neoplatonism with Aristotelianism.
That work contains the doctrine common to the Essenes with Plato, and suggestive of Persian Dualism, that God is the author of good only.
His commentaries on Plato and Ptolemy are lost.
It was a centre of Greek civilization, devoted especially to the worship of Artemis, and producing famous teachers, of whom Stephen the Byzantine mentions Ariston, Kerykos and Plato.
Thus the metaphysic of Plato finds reality only in the "Idea," of which all phenomena are merely imperfect copies.
He was the first who published a book on the Pythagorean doctrines, a treatise of which Plato made use in the composition of his Timaeus.
It is probable that Aesop did not commit his fables to writing; Aristophanes (Wasps, 1259) represents Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets, and Socrates whiles away his time in prison by turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verse (Plato, Phaedo, 61 b).
He withdrew subsequently with a number of fellow disciples to Megara, and it has been conjectured, though there is no direct evidence, that this was the period of Plato's residence in Megara, of which indications appear in the Theaetetus.
The principal are - in Italian, the famous Il Galateo (1558), a treatise of manners, which has been translated into several languages, and in Latin, De officiis, and translations from Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle.
Commentaries on Plato, mentioned by Porphyry in his life of Plotinus, have also been lost.
He became famous as a translator of Homer and Plato.
It is thus a dialogue within a dialogue, after the manner of Plato, but a conversation of sufficient length to occupy several days (though represented as taking place in one) could not be conveyed in a style similar to the short conversations of Socrates.
At Göttingen he studied Plato with Heeren, New Testament Greek with Eichhorn and natural science with Blumenbach.
On the other hand, it is argued that the authority of Galen and Cicero (pro Cluentio) place it beyond a doubt that, so far from being allowed to pass with impunity, the offence in question was sometimes punished by death; that the authority of Lysias is of doubtful authenticity; and that the speculative reasonings of Plato and Aristotle, in matters of legislation, ought not to be confounded with the actual state of the laws.
The needless bitterness of his attacks upon Plato (in the Comparatio Aristotelis et Platonis), which drew forth a powerful response from Bessarion (q.v.), and the manifestly hurried and inaccurate character of his translations of Plato, Aristotle and other classical authors, combined to ruin his fame as a scholar, and to endanger his position as a teacher of philosophy.
From a life by Diogenes Laertius, we learn that he studied at Athens under Plato, but, being dismissed, passed over into Egypt, where he remained for sixteen months with the priests of Heliopolis.
In this aversion to a purely or mainly intellectual training may be traced a recoil from the systematic metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, whose tendency was to subordinate the practical man to the philosopher.
Hence, in the second place, Plato and Aristotle had assumed a perfect state with laws to guide the individual aright.
The founders of the school sought to invest their doctrines with the halo of tradition by ascribing them to Pythagoras and Plato, and there is no reason to accuse them of insincerity.
They went back to the later period of Plato's thought, the period when Plato endeavoured to combine his doctrine of Ideas with the Pythagorean number-theory, and identified the Good with the One, the source of the duality of the Infinite and the Measured (rd .bretpov and 71-pas) with the resultant scale of realities from the One down to the objects of the material world.
In this system we distinguish not only the asceticism of Pythagoras and the later mysticism of Plato, but also the influence of the Orphic mysteries.
The Ideas of Plato are no longer self-subsistent entities; they are the elements which constitute the content of spiritual activity.
It connects the teaching of Plato with the doctrines of Neoplatonism and brings it into line with the later Stoicism and with the ascetic system of the Essenes.
Modern critics would place his birth later, - between 444 and 436 B.C.,- because, in Plato's Republic, of which the scene is laid about 430 B.C., Cephalus, the father of Lysias, is among the dramatis personae, and the emigration of Lysias to Thurii was said to have followed his father's death.
The latter statement, however, rests only on the Plutarchic life; nor can Plato's dialogue be safely urged as a minutely accurate authority.
The opening scene of Plato's Republic is laid at the house of his eldest son, Polemarchus, in Peiraeus.
Litt., gives the date of birth as about 4501 the Sicilian family were well known to Plato, and that their houses must often have been hospitable to such gatherings..
This has generally been regarded as Plato's own work; but the certainty of this conclusion will be doubted by those who observe (I) the elaborate preparations made in the dialogue for a recital of the EpwrcKOS which shall be verbally exact, and (2) the closeness of the criticism made upon it.
It led, through Dion, to the several visits of Plato to Sicily under both the elder and the younger Dionysius.
Some of the ancients connected her with the earth; Plato, followed by the Stoics, derived her name from tip, the air.
He was much influenced by Lucretius and had read Plato.
Various anticipations of pragmatism in the history of philosophy are noted in Schiller's Plato or Protagoras ?
The comic poets satirized them, and Plato and Demosthenes inveighed against them; but they continued to spread, with all their fervid enthusiasm, their superstition and their obscene practices, wide among the people, whose religious cravings were not satisfied with the purely external religions of Hellenism.
Plato mentions that the Phrygian words for "dog," "fire," &c., were the same as the Greek; and to these we may add from inscriptions the words for "mother," "king," &c. A few inscriptions of the ancient period are known, and a larger number of the Roman period have been published in the Oesterreichische Jahreshefte (1905).
The Buddha found it (as Plato also found it) 1 in the influence exercised upon one life by a desire felt in the previous life.
In depth of philosophic insight, in the method of Socratic questioning often adopted, in the earnest and elevated tone of the whole, in the evidence they afford of the most cultured thought of the day, these dialogues constantly remind the reader of the dialogues of Plato.
For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet between Mars and Jupiter, Giuseppe Piazzi (q.v.) had already discovered the first of the asteroids (Ceres) on the ist of January 1801.
Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences.
The Phenomenology stands to the Encyklopadie somewhat as the dialogues of Plato stand to the Aristotelian treatises.
Meyer and others), or accept the tradition that it was founded during the first Messenian War, which necessitated a prolonged absence from Sparta on the part of both kings (Plato, Laws, iii.
Gradually they extended their powers, aided by the jealousy between the royal houses, which made it almost impossible for the two kings to co-operate heartily, and from the 5th to the 3rd century they exercised a growing despotism which Plato justly calls a tyrannis (Laws, 692).
On the History of Animals no commentary at all exists, and Plato's Republic is substituted for the then inaccessible Politics.
He was the author of a commentary on the Republic of Plato, which is lost, but we still possess by him a short but comprehensive work (ITparrlyuais) on the duties of a general.
Finally, the practice of rhetoric and eristic, which presently became prominent in sophistical teaching, had, or at any rate seemed to have, a mischievous effect upon conduct; and the charge of seeking, whether in exposition or in debate, not truth but victory - which charge was impressively urged against the sophists by Plato - grew into an accusation of holding and teaching immoral and unsocial doctrines, and in our own day has been the subject of eager controversy.
It is plain that Prodicus was an affected pedant; yet his simple conventional morality found favour, and Plato (Rep. 600 C) couples him with Protagoras in his testimony to the popularity of the sophists and their teaching.
He had already reached the height of his fame when Plato opened a rival school at the Academy, and pointedly attacked him in the Gorgias, the Plaaedrus and the Republic. Thenceforward, there was a perpetual controversy between the rhetorician and the philosopher, and the struggle of educational systems continued until, in the next generation, the philosophers were left in possession of the field.
Again, as the Socratics - Plato himself, when he established himself at the Academy, being no exception - were, like their master, educators rather than philosophers, and in their teaching laid especial stress upon discussion, they, too, were doubtless regarded as sophists, not by Isocrates only, but by their contemporaries in general; and it may be conjectured that the disputatious tendencies of the Megarian school made it all the more difficult for Plato and others to secure a proper appreciation of the difference between dialectic, or discussion with a view to the discovery of truth, and eristic, or discussion with a view to victory.
That sophistry must be studied in its historical development was clearly seen by Plato, whose dialogue called the Sophist contains a formal review of the changing phases and aspects of sophistical teaching.
Thus the first and second definitions represent the founders of the sophistry of culture, Protagoras and Prodicus, from the respective points of view of the older Athenians, who disliked the new culture, and the younger Athenians, who admired it; the third and fourth definitions represent imitators to whom the note of itinerancy was not applicable; the fifth definition represents the earlier eristics, contemporaries of Socrates, whom it was necessary to distinguish from the teachers of forensic oratory; the sixth is framed to meet the anomalous case of Socrates, in whom many saw the typical sophist, though Plato conceives this view to be unfortunate; and the seventh and final definition, having in view eristical sophistry fully developed, distinguishes it from SfµoXoyuci, i.e.
Now it is easy to see that in this careful statement Plato recognizes three periods.
The fifth and sixth definitions represent the close of the 5th century, when sophistry handled eristically, and perhaps, though Plato demurs to the inclusion, dialectically, questions of justice, injustice and the like, Su
Whereas, when sophistry began, prose composition was hardly practised in central Greece, the sophists were still the leaders in literature and oratory when Plato wrote the Republic, and they had hardly lost their position when Demosthenes delivered the Philippics.
As for the classification of sophistical methods, so for their criticism, the testimony of Plato is all-important.
It may be conjectured that, when he emerged from the purely Socratic phase of his earlier years, Plato gave himself to the study of contemporary methods of education and to the elaboration of an educational system of his own, and that it was in this way that he came to the metaphysical speculations of his maturity.
Plato's criticisms of the sophists are then, in the opinion of the present writer, no mere obiter dicta, introduced for purposes of literary adornment or dramatic effect, but rather the expressions of profound and reasoned conviction, and, as such, entitled at any rate to respect.
For the details of Plato's critique the reader should go not to the summaries of commentators, but to the dialogues themselves.
In this place it is sufficient to say that, while Plato accounts no education satisfactory which has not knowledge for its basis, he emphatically prefers the scepticism of Socrates, which, despairing of knowledge, seeks right opinion, to the scepticism of the sophists, which, despairing of knowledge, abandons the attempt to better existing beliefs.
Nor can we regard " Plato and his followers as the authorized teachers of the Greek nation and the sophists as the dissenters."
On the contrary, the sophists were in quiet possession of the field when Plato, returning to Athens, opened the rival school of the Academy; and, while their teaching in all respects accommodated itself to current opinion, his, in many matters, ran directly counter to it.
Various as were the phases through which sophistry passed between the middle of the 5th century and the middle of the 4th, the sophists - Socrates himself being no exception - had in their declared antagonism to philosophy a common characteristic; and, if in the interval, philosophical speculation being temporarily suspended, scepticism ceased for the time to be peculiar, at the outset, when Protagoras and Gorgias broke with the physicists, and in the sequel, when Plato raised the cry of " back to Parmenides," this common characteristic was distinctive.
And, though the modern critic will not be prepared with Plato to deny the name of education to all teaching which is not based upon an ontology, it may nevertheless be thought that normal sophistry - as opposed to the sophistry of Socrates - was in various degrees unsatisfactory, in so far as it tacitly or confessedly ignored the " material " element of exposition by reasoning.
Excellent as a statement of the aim and method of Isocrates, and tolerable as a statement of those of Gorgias, these phrases are inexact if applied to Protagoras, who, making " civic virtue " his aim, regarded statesmanship and administration as parts of " civic virtue ", and consequently assigned to oratory no more than a subordinate place in his programme, while to the eristics - whose existence is attested not only by Plato, but also by Isocrates and Aristotle - and to Socrates - whom Grote himself accounts a sophist - the description is plainly and palpably inappropriate.
Now this view is inconsistent with the evidence of Plato, who, in the Sophist, in his final and operative definition, gives prominence to the eristical element, and plainly accounts it the main characteristic not indeed of the sophistry of the 5th century, but of the sophistry of the 4th.
In particular he allows that " there was at any rate enough of charlatanism in Protagoras and Hippias to prevent any ardour for their historical reputation," that the sophists generally " had in their lifetime more success than they deserved," that it was " antagonism to their teaching which developed the genius of Socrates," and, above all, that, " in his anxiety to do justice to the Sophist, Grote laid more stress than is at all necessary on the partisanship of Plato."
That Plato was not careful to distinguish the Megarians and the Cynics from the eristical sophists, and that the disputants of the 4th century affected some of the mannerisms of the greatest disputant of the 5th century, he willingly concedes.
Nor is it possible to accept the statements that " the splendid genius, the lasting influence, and the reiterated polemics of Plato have stamped the name sophist upon the men against whom he wrote as if it were their recognized, legitimate and peculiar designation," and that " Plato not only stole the name out of general circulation,.
Nor is Grote altogether just in his account of Plato's attitude towards the several sophists, or altogether judicious in his appreciation of Plato's testimony.
Indeed, the author of this article finds in the writings of Plato a grave and discriminating study of the several forms of sophistry, and no trace whatsoever of that blind hostility which should warrant us in neglecting his clear and precise evidence.
In a word, the present writer agrees with Grote that the sophists were not a sect or school with common doctrine or method; that their theoretical and practical morality was neither above nor below that of their age, being, in fact, determined by it; and that Plato and his followers are not to be regarded as the authorized teachers of the Greek nation, nor the sophists as the dissenters, but vice versa.
The term has been applied in modern usage, due to Plato's Symposium, to a collection of opinions of different writers on a given subject.
He tells us that he drew largely from Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and writings of the Peripatetics.
The de Legibus, a sequel to this work in imitation of Plato's Laws, is drawn largely from Chrysippus.
The idea is drawn from Aristo of Chios, and the materials largely derived from Xenophon and Plato.
In 1856 Grote began to prepare his works on Plato and Aristotle.
Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (3 vols.) appeared in 1865, but the work on Aristotle he was not destined to complete.
In dealing with Plato he was handicapped by this very common sense, which prevented him from appreciating the theory of ideas in its widest relations.
His Plato is important in that it emphasizes the generally neglected passages of Plato in which he seems to indulge in mere Socratic dialectic rather than to seek knowledge; it is, therefore, to be read as a corrective to the ordinary criticism of Plato.
The Plato was finally edited by Alexander Bain in 4 vols.
In this way the Presocratics and Sophists, and still more Socrates and Plato, threw out hints on sense and reason, on inferential processes and scientific methods which may be called anticipations of logic. But Aristotle was the first to conceive of reasoning itself as a definite subject of a special science, which he called analytics or analytic science, specially designed to analyse syllogism and especially demonstrative syllogism, or science, and to be in fact a science of sciences.
On the other hand, the demonstrations of mathematical sciences of his time, and the logical forms of deduction evinced in Plato's dialogues, provided him with admirable examples of deduction, which is also the inference most capable of analysis.
The sophist Protagoras had distinguished various kinds of sentences, and Plato had divided the sentence into noun and verb, signifying a thing and the action of a thing.
Among the dialecticians, Socrates had used inductive arguments to obtain definitions as data of deductive arguments against his opponents, and Plato had insisted on the processes of ascending to and descending from an unconditional principle by the power of giving and receiving argument.
Logic arose, at least for the Western world, in the golden age of Greek speculation which culminated in Plato and Aristotle.
It is with Aristotle that the bookish tradition begins to dominate the evolution of logic. The technical perfection of the analysis which he offers is, granted the circle of presuppositions within which it works, so decisive, that what precedes, even Plato's logic, is not unnaturally regarded as merely preliminary and subsidiary to it.
It is equally no accident that the name of Protagoras is to be connected, in Plato's view at least, with the rival school of Heracliteans.
The Theaetetus indeed, in which Plato essays to deal with them, is in the broad sense of the word logical, the first distinctively logical treatise that has come down to us.
As presented to us, for example, in Plato's surely not altogether hostile caricature in the Euthydemus, they mark the intellectual preparation for, and the moral need for, the advance of the next generation.
Plato's problem was to find a way of ' Nothing is.
Between Euclides and Antisthenes the Socratic induction and universal definition were alike discredited from the point of view of the Eleatic logic. It is with the other point of doctrine that Plato comes to grips, that which allows of a certainty or knowledge consisting in an analysis of a compound into simple elements themselves not known.
It is the wealth of illustration with which Plato expresses his meaning, and the range of application which he gives the idea - to the class 4 For whom see Diimmler, Antisthenica (1882, reprinted in his Kleine Schriften, 1901).
Plato replies with the doctrine of the interpenetration of ideas, obviously not of all with all, but of some with some, the formula of identity in difference within thought itself.
Plato proceeds to explain by his principle of difference both privative and negative predicates, and also the possibility of false predication.
Even Plato, however, perhaps scarcely shows that with it, and nothing else but it, error is explained.
Plato's division is nevertheless neither syllogism nor exclusiva.
Plato's successors in the Academy must have developed a system of grammaticological categories which Aristotle could make his own.
The first may have linked on to the series of Plato's dialogues of search, and to put the Parmenides before it is impossible.
For Plato's logic this question only has interest on account of the introduction of an 'AptoToTO?
The doctrine of latency is mystical and savours of Plato's reminiscence (anamnesis).
Plato is full of the faith of mathematical physics.
For those of the school of Plato whc refused the apostasy of the new academy, there was hope either in the mathematical side of the Pythagoreo.
Neoplatonism had accepted the Aristotelian logic with its sharper definition than anything handed down from Plato, and, except the logic of the Sceptics, there was no longer any rival discipline of the like prestige.
He has read Plato's Theaetetus in the light of Baconian and individualist preconceptions.
Plato had made God accessible to the highest knowledge as the transcendent idea, remote from the world.
For his zeal he was confined for five years in the fortress of Kolberg, where he studied Plato and the Greek poets.
On the contrary, Plato and other Attic writers use the word to include interpreters and admirers - in short, the whole " spiritual kindred " - of Homer.
Other names of the pre-Socratic and Socratic times are mentioned by Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle.
The author of the Hipparchus is evidently influenced by the anti-democratical tendencies in which he only followed Plato.
While, on one hand, he combines much that had been suggested by Parmenides, Pythagoras and the Ionic schools, he has germs of truth that Plato and Aristotle afterwards developed; he is at once a firm believer in Orphic mysteries, and a scientific thinker, precursor of the physical scientists.
In Plato for the first time we find a truly dualistic conception of the universe.
Both groups had their scientific theologians who sought to vindicate their characteristic doctrines, the Adoptianist divines holding by the Aristotelian philosophy, and the Modalists by that of the Stoics; while the Trinitarians (Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, Novatian), on the other hand, appealed to Plato.
For older thinkers like Plato and Aristotle the perfect life was that of the citizen and householder; but the Cynics were individualists, citizens of the world without loyalty or respect for the ancient city state, the decay of which was coincident with their rise.
A subordinate matter in the book that attracted much attention at the time is the conception of the "Plastic Medium," which is a mere revival of Plato's "World-Soul," and is meant to explain the existence and laws of nature without referring all to the direct operation of God.
Cudworth's ideas, like Plato's, have "a constant and never-failing entity of their own," such as we see in geometrical figures; but, unlike Plato's, they exist in the mind of God, whence they are communicated to finite understandings.
This, according to 1 The word Idola is manifestly borrowed from Plato.
The with Plato is the fleeting, transient image of the real thing, and the passage evidently referred to by Bacon is that in the Rep. vii.
Hierocles, writing in the 5th century A.D., states that his fundamental doctrine was an eclecticism, derived from a critical study of Plato and Aristotle.
The belief that the Powers controlling man's life are willing upon occasion to disclose something of their purpose, has led to widespread rites of divination, which Plato described as the " art of fellowship between gods and men," and the Stoics defended on grounds of a priori religious expectation as well as of universal experience.