Plato - Historical Context

Plato lived within an aristocratic family and with great political influence Athenian. The first few years of his life were marked by wars of the Peloponnese, between Athens and Sparta, a conflict facing democracy and oligarchy.

With twenty years began its contacts with Socrates, a philosopher Plato who admired and became his disciple. The Socratic influence is notable in Platonic philosophy, especially during her youth. During this stage did the Athenian defeat in the war, which led the city to an authoritarian rule imposed by the victors Spartans. However, this government was not capable of ensuring order and justice, and soon was overthrown and restored democracy. These facts away from the more Plato's policy, and led him to worry about more theoretical issues.

After the unjust death of Socrates, Plato, plunged into a new crisis, began a series of trips that took him by various countries. In Egypt he met followers of Heraclitus and Parmenides, the two authors who initiated the change problem, and also was related to some mathematicians, especially those pitagicos Sicily, greatly influenced by the thinking of philosopher.

After the trip to Sicily, Plato returned to Athens and founded ; Academy, a school that was the cultural center in Athens for many centuries, and where he enjoyed a great intellectual freedom and studied many subjects. At this stage academic Plato developed his theories and most important works.

With 60 aos, began a new trip to Sicily to try to implement the political ideal of his work The Republic . However, the trip was a failure, and two years later returned to the Academy. During those two years in Sicily, Plato carried out numerous meditations on his filosofy it led to doubts about its validity. Once back in Athens, met Aristotle, which was a great encouragement for him, and lived the rest of his days reviewing their works and writing new ones.

The Platonic philosophy has had a great influence on Western thought: his soul-body dualism is the foundation of Christian anthropology, his theory about the world of ideas and things marked the beginning of the issue on the universal, one of the central themes in medieval philosophy, and was the basis for the Cartesian rationalism and idealism hegeliano . In turn, his theories about math and politics also had a great influence on thoughts of later times.