Plato

Yet Athens’s decisive role in Western history was far from over, for it was the next century that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and the very foundations of Western philosophy. Socrates’ death sentence was carried out in 399 BCE, and his greatest student and follower, Plato, opened his famed Academy in 387 BCE. There Plato put forward many of the core c

... See more

PLATO and Aristotle were the most influential of all philosophers, ancient, medieval, or modern; and of the two, it was Plato who had the greater effect upon subsequent ages. I say this for two reasons: first, that Aristotle himself is an outcome of Plato; second, that Christian theology and philosophy, at any rate until the thirteenth century, was

... See more

These ideas were further advanced, and modified, by Plato’s greatest student and arguably the greatest thinker in Western history, Aristotle. Aristotle went on to start his own school, the Lyceum, rightly considered to be the world’s first university, in 335 BCE. Unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle was committed not only to philosophical contemplat

... See more