The most famous Pope Leo, Leo X, was steeped in Plato.
The eminent Byzantine Greek scholar George Gemistos Plethon, who privately rejected Christianity, so admired Plato that he took the name ‘Plethon’. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, he reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and the Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).
While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. Ficino seems to have coined the term ‘Platonic love’ [amor platonicus], which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettisimo [‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’], the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.
Cosimo appointed Ficino as tutor to his grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492)—who, within his own lifetime, came to be known as ‘the Magnificent’. Lorenzo retrieved large numbers of classical works from the East and established a workshop to have them copied and disseminated. His circle of friends, which included the likes of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, supported the development of Renaissance humanism. His handsome brother Giuliano served as the model for Mars in Botticelli’s Mars and Venus, and Lorenzo also sponsored the likes of Ghirlandaio, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, who, for three years, lived and dined with him.
Lorenzo’s second son Giovanni rose to the papacy as Leo X (r. 1513-21). According to Alexandre Dumas père, Christianity under Leo ‘assumed a pagan, Greco-Roman character… Crimes for the moment disappeared, to give place to vices; but to charming vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus.’
After Giuliano’s murder in the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo raised his illegitimate nephew, Giulio di Giuliano, as his own son. As the second Medici pope, Clement VII (r. 1523-34), Giulio approved Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe a century before Galileo’s heresy trial for similar ideas. He also commissioned works by Cellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo, including Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. What an ending, for a bastard orphan.
In the early twentieth century, digs on Crete, led by Sir Arthur Evans, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people Evans called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos. The Minoans flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE, and their society came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island.
The Minoans grew rich from trade and acquired a hold on some of their neighbours, including perhaps on the city of Athens. According to myth, King Minos exacted out of Athens a nine-yearly tribute of seven boys and seven girls, to be thrown to the illegitimate son of Minos’ queen Pasiphae, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, imprisoned in the labyrinth beneath the royal palace at Knossos.
But when the time came for the third tribute, Theseus, the founder-hero of Athens, took the place of one of the sacrificial boys in a daring bid to end this barbaric practice. Theseus killed the Minotaur with some help from Minos’ daughter Ariadne, who had given him a ball of red thread by which to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Theseus escaped with Ariadne but later abandoned her on the island of Naxos, to be wedded by the god Dionysus.
The myth of the Minotaur served in part to account for the shift in power from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, and, later, to Athens, and it is significant that Theseus also unified Attica under Athens, laying the foundation for the later Athenian Empire. The Mycenaeans flourished from around 1750 to 1050 BCE, with important centres, each built around a fortified palace, at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens, among others. They were dominated by a warrior aristocracy, and advanced by conquest rather than by trade as the Minoans had done. Their greatest achievement, sung by Homer, was the conquest of Troy in around 1250 BCE.
Towards the close of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans may have come under increasing pressure from the Dorians to the north. Whatever its cause, it took some three hundred years for Greece to recover from the demise of the Mycenaeans. During these Dark Ages, old trade links dissolved, the arts and crafts regressed, and famine set in. Many Greeks took to the seas in search of arable land, beginning a culture of colonization.
Looking to the upside, the disintegration of the rigid hereditary hierarchy of the Mycenaeans prepared the ground for a more open society, leading, in due course, to Athenian democracy. In particular, the loss of the Mycenaean king, or wanax, led to a loosening of the bond between myth and ritual so that myth became more detached and disinterested, paving the way for literature and philosophy.
The Mycenaean Linear B script, used for administration and mainly found in palace archives, fell into desuetude during the Dark Ages. Consisting of 87 syllabic and over 100 ideographic signs, Linear B derived from the as yet undeciphered Linear A, used by the non-Greek Minoans to record their mysterious language or languages.
By 770 BCE, close contact with the Phoenicians in the east led to the adoption of a phonetic system of language notation. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad (an alphabet with only consonants), which had been developed for a semitic language, to include vowels, thereby creating the basis for our own modern alphabet.
Significantly, this phonetic script was no longer the preserve of an elite of priests and scribes, used to reaffirm royal power, but a common good, used, more and more, to argue and debate and question the status quo. Life in the emerging city-states [poleis] no longer centred on the royal acropolis, now turned over to the gods, but on the public square or agora, and the nearby law courts where large citizen juries listened to long, elaborate speeches and grew familiar with the concept of objective truth.
The Pre-Socratics and their significance
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates numbers Thales of Miletus (c. 624-c. 548 BCE) among the Seven Sages of Greece. Thales held that the Earth floats on water, which is the primary substance from which all else is made. ‘Presumably’ says Aristotle, ‘he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist…’ Or perhaps he derived it from similar Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hebrew accounts of creation. But in a break with these traditions, he sought to explain the world without resorting to myths and gods, which is why he is often regarded as the first genuine philosopher, as well as the first genuine scientist. When Bertrand Russell (d. 1970) declared that ‘philosophy begins with Thales’, he was, in fact, merely agreeing with Aristotle.
Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610-546 BCE) took Thales as a model and starting point. Like Thales, he sought for the primary substance, or arkhē, which he identified not with water but with apeiron [‘the boundless’]. The Earth, he held, is a cylinder with a height of one-third of its diameter. Thales had claimed that the Earth floats upon water, without specifying what the water might rest upon. Anaximander got round this problem by positing that the cylinder need not be supported: because it is in the middle of everything, there is no reason for it to move in one direction over another. As far as we know, this is the oldest argument founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which every instance of change requires a reason or cause.
Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 586-c.526 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander, rejected apeiron and replaced it with his own arkhē, aēr [air, but also mist and vapour]. The Earth is a flat disc that floats on a cushion of aēr. Anaximenes elaborated upon Thales and Anaximander by positing a mechanism, or two mechanisms, rarefaction and condensation, by which his arkhē might pass into and out of everything else. When aēr is rarefied, it becomes fire; when it is condensed, it becomes wind, then cloud, then water, then stones… To support this thesis, Anaximenes appealed to a simple experiment: when one exhales on one’s hand, the air is hot; but if one blows through pursed lips, the air becomes cold and dense. With his emphasis on change and its process, Anaximenes might be thought of as a forerunner of Heraclitus. The Milesian search for the basic material out of which all things are made may sound quaint and quixotic, until we remember that it is the same quest that our nuclear physicists are embarked upon—this time with the help of giant particle accelerators.
After the downfall of Miletus in 494 BCE, the epicentre of philosophy shifted westwards, away from Ionia and towards Athens and the cities of Italy. At the age of 40, Pythagoras of Samos (c. 560-c. 495 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on. This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres’, according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony. Some two thousand years later, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) held that, though inaudible, this ‘music of the spheres’ might nonetheless be heard by the soul. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.
Xenophanes (c. 570-c. 478 BCE) came from Colophon in Ionia, but left in his mid-twenties and ‘tossed about the Greek Land’ for 67 years—as he himself tells us in one of his 45 surviving fragments. He clearly knew of Pythagoras, whom he discusses in Fragment 7. Xenophanes criticized the likes of Homer and Hesiod for anthropomorphizing the gods (conceiving of them in human form) and portraying them as immoral or amoral. But far from being an atheist, he instead suggested that there is ‘one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought’. He held that the primary substance is earth, while also acknowledging the importance of water to life. From the existence of inland fossils, he inferred that the earth had at one time been covered by the sea. Despite pronouncing himself on the weightiest matters, he warned that secure knowledge is impossible: ‘There never was or will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so.’ This subtle and original distinction between knowledge and true belief is further developed by Plato in the Theaetetus. Another skeptical (or proto-skeptical) point made by Xenophanes is that our perceptions and beliefs are relative and context-dependent: ‘If god had not made brown honey, men would think figs far sweeter than they do.’
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515-c. 440 BCE) in southern Italy may have been acquainted with Xenophanes, whose work he knew. In contrast to his contemporary Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), who held that everything is in a state of flux (as epitomised by his saying that you cannot step twice into the same river), Parmenides argued that nothing ever changes. He wrote a poem, On Nature, which begins with a proem in which the narrator (presumably himself) ascends to the abode of an unnamed goddess.
To her guest, the goddess reveals the nature of reality, or ‘Way of Truth’—which I shall paraphrase for you:
What is, is, and it is impossible for it not to be. And what is not is not, and it is impossible for it to be. One cannot conceive of what is not, because one cannot think or speak about nothing. Conversely, if one can think or speak about something, then that thing must be, ‘for thought and being are the same.’ It being possible to think about reality, reality must be—and if it is, it cannot not be. Something cannot come into being, or pass out of being, because something cannot come into being from nothing, or pass from something into nothing. Thus, if something comes into being, it does so not from nothing but from something—so that it does not really come into being at all. From this, it follows that there can be no becoming and thus no real change, even though sense experience tells us otherwise. Motion is impossible because it would require moving into a void, that is, moving into nothing, which does not exist. If motion and change are impossible, the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity—which Parmenides called, ‘the One’.
To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his follower and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments such as ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ designed to undermine ordinary beliefs about motion, space, time, and plurality. Aristotle outlines ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ in the Physics: ‘In a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.’
What is new and revolutionary about ‘the Way of Truth’ is that it consists in a long chain of strictdeductive argumentation from premises that are taken to be necessary truths. The conclusion, startling though it is, seems to follow necessarily from the premises, posing a serious challenge to anyone defending a different or commonsense position. Two thousand years later, Descartes would embark on a similar project in search of truths deemed to be incontrovertible.
The pre-Socratics conceived of the universe as an ordered whole. They attempted to explain its fundamental features without resorting to myths and gods. Instead of accounting for the here and now by the supposed beginning, they accounted for the supposed beginning by the here and now. In so doing, they gave rise to the very idea of philosophy and science, and, more pertinently for us, to the rules or principles of reasoning on which they rely. Reason, after all, is the understanding of causes, which is why it is called ‘reason’. What may have come as a surprise to them, especially after Parmenides, is that reason could conflict with ordinary sense experience—perhaps more so even than mythology and religion.
Other scientific or academic attitudes adopted by the Pre-Socratics include conceiving of the world as intelligible; searching for knowledge for its own sake; asking bold questions without fear or favour; developing and manipulating abstract concepts; and privileging elegant and economical explanations.
At the same time, many pre-Socratics, such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, retained something of a mystical streak. Like the mythologists of old, they were more interested in cosmogony than in uncovering the laws of nature, that is, more interested in grand narratives than in formulating empirically verifiable hypotheses. Although familiar with the work of their forebears and contemporaries—and, it seems, highly driven by it—they did not rigorously critique one another in the way that Aristotle would do in writing a whole book on (or against) Democritus.
The Sophists
Now down from the ivory towers and back to the budding assemblies and law courts. The sophistic movement, which revolved around Golden Age Athens (480-404 BCE), owed to a concatenation of unusual social and political circumstances, not least: a renewed sense of self-confidence and optimism fuelled by the improbable repulsion of two Persian invasions; the great wealth flowing in from the maritime empire that had grown out of an anti-Persian defensive alliance; and an extreme participatory democracy in which the power to speak was the power to lead. Political power, however, was a double-edged sword, since prominent citizens were vulnerable to vexatious lawsuits—and, rather than hiring a lawyer, had to mount their own defence.
In this climate, the ability to speak became paramount, and the sophists—essentially teachers of rhetoric—converged upon Athens to deliver public lectures and private classes, typically to young aristoi with worldly ambitions. Other Greek poleis, especially in Sicily and Italy, also called upon their services, so that the chief sophists were continually on tour. When in Athens, they would often reside at the house of a patron such as the magnate Callias, at whose house Plato’s Protagoras is set, or the politician Callicles, at whose house Plato’s Gorgias is set. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house in Athens’ [Protagoras 337d] and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’ [Apology20a].
In the Protagoras, Plato intimates that Protagoras invented the role of the professional sophist. Protagoras gravitated towards Athens and so impressed Pericles that, in 444, Pericles invited him to draft the constitution of Thurri, his experimental panhellenic colony on the Tarantine Gulf—settled, among others, by the historian Herodotus and the orator Lysias. Protagoras is perhaps best remembered for his maxim that ‘man is the measure of all things’, attacked in Plato’s Theaetetus on the grounds that, if true, nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the maxim itself. According to Protagoras, the value of an opinion lies not in its truth but in its usefulness to the person who holds it, a slippery position that could readily be seized upon by scoundrels in search of self-justification.
Protagoras is also remembered for the outré opening of his lost work, About the Gods:
About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.
Protagoras charged extortionate fees for his services. According to Aulus Gellius, he once took on a pupil, Euathlus, on the understanding that he would be paid once Euathlus had won his first court case. However, Euathlus never won a case, and after a time Protagoras sued him for non-payment. Protagoras argued that if he won the case he would be paid, and if Euathlus won the case, he would still be paid, because Euathlus would then have won a case. Euathlus, having assimilated the methods of his master, retorted that if he won the case he would not have to pay, and if Protagoras won the case, he still would not have to pay, because he still would not have won a case! This so-called Paradox of the Court, and the concomitant Counterdilemma of Euathlus, is also told of Corax [‘Crow’] of Syracuse and his student Tisias, the nominal founders or inventors of rhetoric. One version ends with the judge throwing them both out of the court with the words, Kakou korakos kakon ōon [‘A bad egg from a bad crow’].
Sophistês [‘expert’] derives from sophos [‘wise’], and originally designated one who is learnt or skilled in a particular art or craft. But the term began to acquire derogatory connotations even before Plato, who held most sophists in contempt. The comedian Aristophanes had assimilated Socrates with the sophists, leading, ultimately, to the charges of impiety levied against the philosopher. To rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates, Plato laboured the contrast between Socrates and the sophists, whom he portrayed as venal and amoral and nothing like his poor and pious teacher. As a result, ‘sophistry’ has come to mean something like, ‘the self-interested use of clever but deceptive arguments.’ In an attempt to demarcate and elevate philosophy as a discipline, Plato also sought to undermine poets and orators and all those with a rival but less rigorous claim to the truth.
To be fair to Plato, it does seem that many sophists had a strong and potentially self-serving skeptical streak. Although they did raise many profound questions, they seemed more interested in expediency than in knowledge per se—their primary purpose being to create effective public speakers and enrich themselves in the process, without due regard for the consequences of creating a cohort of venal and amoral leaders. Their habit of undermining the traditional gods turned many conservatives and ordinary people against them, and, ultimately, against Socrates, who was condemned by (false) association.
Socrates and Plato
According to Plato, Socrates had an impetuous friend called Chaerephon, who one day went to Delphi and asked the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that there was no one wiser. Knowing only that he knew nothing, Socrates was perplexed. To discover the meaning of the oracle, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’
Socrates was the wisest of men not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know—or, more subtly, because he knew the limits of the little that he did know. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to have any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was always because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’.
The ever-elusive Plato might also have intended the oracle story as an origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus, which consists in questioning one or more people about an ethical concept such as justice or virtue with the covert aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial (and often cherished) assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding and that we know much less than we thought we did. With our dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we did not first become angry and resentful.
To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. To manage their anger and other feelings, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation, [Socrates] far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’
Although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he independently originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. But it remains that while the sophists tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.
Behind the Socratic method, that is, the method of elenchus as perfected by Socrates, lies the search for rigorous definitions—because it helps, if one is to pronounce on something, to know exactly what that something is. For instance, in Plato’s Meno, Socrates tasks the aristocrat Meno with defining virtue; in the Laches, he tasks the general Laches with defining courage; and in the Euthyphro, he tasks the priest-prophet Euthyphro with defining piety. That Meno, who is philosophically trained, struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him suggests that this search for rigorous definitions is something original and radical. For Socrates, it is not enough simply to define a concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what the gods all love’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the essence of a concept, applies to all its instances and none more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves (who might also be virtuous), and too broad for including those who rule unjustly (and who are therefore not virtuous).
When seeking to define something, Socrates sometimes turns to the method of collection and division. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he responds to an orator’s speech on love with two speeches of his own. In his first speech, he debases love by claiming that it is a form of madness. But in his second, more considered, speech, he praises love for being ‘the highest form of madness’. Later in the dialogue, he points out that rhetoric has the most power with abstract notions such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ that mean different things to different people and even to the same person from moment to moment. For this reason, in his second speech, he began by distinguishing between human and divine madness, and the four forms of divine madness (prophecy, mystic rites, poetry, and love). This, he says, involved collecting all the various forms of madness, and then dividing them up again ‘according to the natural formation’.
Occasionally, Socrates proceeded instead by the maieutic method, which is often confused with the method of elenchus. But whereas the Socratic method aims at aporia [suspension of belief], the maieutic method aims more properly at hypothesis generation and testing.
In Plato’s Theaetetus, the young Theaetetus contrasts his ease in defining mathematical terms with his difficulty in defining knowledge. He confesses that he has long pondered the problem of knowledge and suffers from his lack of an adequate solution. Socrates responds, ‘These are the pangs of labour, my dear Theaetetus; you have something within you which you are bringing forth.’ Socrates goes on to compare himself to a midwife [maia—hence, ‘maieutic method’] who works with men rather than women, and the soul rather than the body. Just as the midwife is beyond bearing age, so he too is barren—not of children, but of wisdom. All he can do is bring forth the wisdom of others and thoroughly examine it.
Once he understands what Socrates is asking of him, Theaetetus offers three definitions of knowledge (knowledge as perception, knowledge as true belief, and knowledge as true belief with an account, i.e. justified true belief), each of which is rejected, or falsified, by Socrates. So although the Theaetetus ends in aporia, it is more of an exploratory dialogue than a classic aporetic one. It is no coincidence that Theaetetus is a model of humility and perplexity: because he begins in aporia, or adogmatism, he is an ideal candidate for the more positive, collaborative maieutic method.
Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of [these kinds of contradiction]; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.
I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Aristotle
When, in 366, Plato returned from his second trip to Syracuse, he would have found a bright new face at the Academy. The young Aristotle began in Plato’s fold, even writing dialogues in the manner of Plato, but later diverged from him and founded his own school, the Lyceum.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle privileged observation over speculation. Like modern scientists, he began with a systematic gathering of data, from which he attempted to infer explanations and make predictions. He carried out dissections and even rudimentary experiments such as cutting out the heart of a turtle to discover that it could still move its limbs for a surprisingly long time. However, he did not carry out anything like modern case-control studies, and relied uncritically on the lay testimony of beekeepers, fishermen, travellers, and the like. This lack of rigour led to some embarrassing errors, such as the claim that lions copulate back-to-back, while bears adopt the missionary position and hedgehogs stand on their hind legs to face each other. Or the claim that the female of several species has fewer teeth than the male. Among these species, he included humans, when he could simply have looked into his wife or daughter’s mouth.
Aristotle referred to the branches of learning as ‘sciences’, and divided them into three groups: practical sciences, productive sciences, and theoretical sciences.
Practical sciences are concerned with right action and beautiful behaviour both at the level of the individual, as in ethics, and at the level of the community, as in politics.
Productive sciences are concerned with products or outcomes, and include, among many others, agriculture, architecture, ship-building, medicine, music, and rhetoric.
Theoretical sciences are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, and comprise both natural sciences and non-empirical forms of knowledge such as mathematic and metaphysics.
Logic, that is, the branch of learning that is concerned with the principles of intellectual inquiry, does not fit into this tripartite division of the sciences, but underpins them all, and stands alone and apart under the heading of Organon [‘Tool’].
Aristotle’s logic, or ‘analytics’ as he called it, is the first ever systematic study of human reasoning, and the second ever formal system after the Astadhyayi [Sanskrit grammar] of Panini. At the end of Sophistical Refutations (the sixth and last book of the Organon), Aristotle himself says that, in most cases, discoveries lean upon the achievements of others, but in this case, ‘Nothing existed at all… we had absolutely nothing else of an earlier date to mention, but were kept at work for a long time in experimental researches.’ More than two thousand years later, no less an authority than Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) deemed Aristotle’s logic to be complete and unsurpassed.
In fact, Chrysippus (d. c. 206 BCE), the third scholarch of the Stoic school, had developed a more sophisticated system of propositional logic. In the third century CE, Diogenes Laertius wrote that Chrysippus was so renowned for dialectic [reasoned argument] that ‘most people thought, if the gods took to dialectic, they would adopt no other system than that of Chrysippus.’ However, Stoic logic came to be lost—along with the more than seven hundred works of Chrysippus (who might otherwise have been a household name)—while Aristotle’s deductive or syllogistic logic came to dominate.Because logic seemed capable of uncovering the hidden truths of nature, the Aristotelian system was heavily taken up in the monasteries and madrasas. In Islamic scholarship, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics came to be appended to the Organon, and it is true that the works lie on a spectrum: whereas the Organon is about uncovering the truth, the Rhetoric and Poetics are about instilling it in less philosophical types.
The Remarkable Life of the Man Who Wired Your Mind
In Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), Plato holds his Timaeus and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his Ethics and gestures towards the world before him.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
A biography of the Divine Teacher, whose dialogues laid the foundations of Western thought.
In Plato’s Lysis, two boys, Lysis and Menexenus, argue about who is the elder. This seems odd, until one realizes that people back then did not have birthdays, but only birth years or birth cohorts.
Plato is likely to have been born in 428/427 BCE. His father Ariston claimed descent from Codrus, the last king of Athens (d. c. 1068 BCE), who himself claimed descent from Poseidon. His mother Perictione descended, more humbly but in a shorter line, from the law-giver Solon. She had Charmides for a brother and Critias for an uncle. Out of a desire to rehabilitate his mother’s family line, or hark back to happier times, Plato often featured his relatives in his dialogues: not only Critias and Charmides, but also his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus.
Plato probably bore the name of his father’s father, Aristocles, but his wrestling coach Ariston of Argos took to calling him ‘Plato’ on account of his broad shoulders. Alternatively, the nickname derived from the breadth of his eloquence, or his large forehead. Had it not stuck, he might have been known to us as Aristocles of Collytus. According to some later writers, he was not the son of Ariston but of Apollo himself—earning him a couple more epithets, ‘Son of Apollo’ and ‘Divine teacher’. In another legend, as the infant Plato slept on Mount Hymettus, the bees settled upon his lips to augur the honeyed words that would one day flow from his mouth.
Plato’s Remarkable Family
When Plato was still a boy, his father died, and his mother married Pyrilampes, her widowed maternal uncle. Pyrilampes already had a son, Demus, who was famed for his good looks, and went on to have another son, Antiphon, with Perictione—making Antiphon Plato’s half-brother. Shortly before marrying Perictione, Pyrilampes suffered a shoulder injury at the Battle of Delium, and it might have been from him that Plato first heard about Socrates and his bravery on the battlefield. Pyrilampes enjoyed a close friendship with Pericles, the de facto leader of Athens. After the birth of Antiphon, Pericles dispatched him to Persia to represent Athens. When he returned from the court of Darius with a pride of peacocks, scurrilous tongues accused him of breeding the birds to procure freeborn women for Pericles. Possibly, it is he who first introduced the peacock to Europe.
Plato no doubt took an engaged interest in the education of Antiphon [‘Responsive voice’, the root of ‘anthem’]. In Plato’s Parmenides, one Cephalus encounters Glaucon and Adeimantus in the agora and asks to meet Antiphon, who happens to be acquainted with the famous conversation that passed between Parmenides, Zeno, and the young Socrates. But Antiphon has, by now, given up philosophy for horses: when the party arrives at Antiphon’s house, they find him with a smith fitting a bridle.
Plato’s eldest brother Glaucon [‘Owl-eyed’, ‘Bright-eyed’, or ‘Grey-eyed’] enjoyed music and mathematics and naturally fell under the spell of the Pythagoreans. Both he and Adeimantus distinguished themselves in the Battle of Megara of 424, and in Plato’s Republic Socrates commends him for his ‘godlike virtues in battle’. In his mid-thirties, Glaucon suffered a minor injury, and thereafter devoted himself to finery, frivolling away his fame and fortune on a large estate that he filled with hunting dogs and pedigreed cocks.
In the Republic, Adeimantus [‘Without fear’] claims that most philosophers are ‘strange monsters, not to say utter rogues’ who are made utterly useless by their study (487d). When, in discussing the ideal state, Socrates proposes that the guardians be without property, he objects that they would be unhappy without luxuries.
Neither Plato nor his three brothers had any children, leaving the joys and burdens of family life to their sister Potone, who had no choice in the matter. Pyrilampes and Critias married her off at an early age to Eurymedon of Myrrhinus, whose greatest achievement was to father Speusippus, the nephew who would follow Plato at the head of the Academy.
Meeting Socrates
The young Plato excelled in his studies, including in gymnastics; according to Aristotle’s student Dicæarchus, he was a well-known wrestler and competed at the Isthmian Games. It is said that Plato started out as a poet and tragedian, but burnt his works after meeting Socrates. Probably, it is Critias who introduced him to Socrates, who must have seemed like a breath of fresh air after his eccentric tutor, the Heraclitean Cratylus.
Socrates too would have been delighted to meet Plato: it is said that, the night before their first meeting, he dreamt of a cygnet on his knees, which at once sprouted feathers and flew up uttering a loud sweet note.
Plato frequented Socrates for, or over, several years. Had Athens been at peace, he might have spent all his days basking in his sunlight. He must have despaired of army life, which he likely looked upon as a rite of passage for a political career.
With the coming of the Thirty Tyrants (following Athens’ defeat by Sparta), Plato may have hoped for a new age of rational government by philosophical men such as Critias and Charmides who embodied the sound values of his aristocratic class. But when, in 404, Critias invited him to join their administration, he held back, repelled by its oppression and, more particularly, its attempt to implicate Socrates in the execution of the innocent Leon of Salamis.
Mercifully, the regime only held out for a matter of months before being routed by the democratic forces in exile, with both Critias and Charmides killed in the heat of battle. If the initial restraint and moderation of the restored democracy did fill Plato with renewed hope, the trial and execution of Socrates would have put paid to any remaining illusions that he might have entertained about Athenian politics.
A Philosopher in Exile
After the fall of the Thirty Tyrants, Plato’s name turned from a major asset into a major liability, and his background, politics, and association with Socrates all sat uncomfortably with the mood of the times. In consequence, he retired with other Socratics to Megara in West Attica, where he resided with Euclid, a Socratic and Eleatic who had been present at the death of Socrates.
Euclid, under the influence of the Eleatics, argued in the manner of Zeno, lending force to his ideas by disproving or discrediting those of his opponents. Socrates thought poorly of such eristics and, in his living, had encouraged him to prefer the more cordial and constructive dialectic method. Despite Euclid’s antagonistic debating style, Plato, Euclid, and the other Socratics must have had many fertile conversations in Megara. By marrying the ideas of Parmenides and Socrates, Euclid would go on to establish the Megarian school of philosophy.
According to Diogenes Laertius, after a time in Megara, Plato crossed to Cyrene, the Libyan birthplace of both Aristippus and the geometer Theodorus. As he had a higher opinion of Theodorus than of Aristippus, he probably stayed with the former, who features as a friend and contemporary of Socrates in three of his later dialogues, the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman.
From Cyrene, Plato may have proceeded to Egypt, before, perhaps, being recalled to Greece to serve in a fresh anti-Spartan alliance.
Among the Pythagoreans
If Plato did get embroiled in the so-called Corinthian War, he may have returned to Athens after the Battle of Coroneia in 394 BCE. Now in his mid-thirties, he no doubt received several marriage proposals, which he turned down in favour of philosophy. He may have started on his dialogues as early as Megara or Cyrene, but now he doubled down. By the time he left for Italy in around 388, he had already written several works, including the Apology, Laches, and Protagoras.
In Taras [modern-day Taranto] on the heel of Italy, Plato visited the foremost Pythagorean philosopher Archytas, with whom he may have discussed the problem of doubling the cube, or so-called Delian problem.
According to Plutarch, the forever feuding Delians had turned in despair to the Delphic oracle, who advised them to double the size of their altar to Apollo. In obeisance to the oracle, they built another altar with sides twice as long—but, if anything, their problems only got worse.
When the Delians wrote to Plato for advice, he replied that the oracle may have meant doubling the volume of the cube, rather than simply doubling the length of its sides—in which case their new altar was four times too large. But since no one knew how to calculate the length of side required to double the volume of a cube, the god may in fact have been telling them to moderate their passions by taking up the study of mathematics and philosophy.
In Taras, Archytas is likely to have introduced Plato to his teacher Eurytus, who had himself been a pupil of Philolaus. Like Philolaus, Eurytus believed that numbers give limit to the limitless and form to matter, and that their odd and even values account for opposites such as rest and motion, light and dark, and one and many. The concept is not dissimilar to modern binary code.
Plato was deeply impressed by Archytas and the Pythagoreans, whose influence is evident in middle works such as the Meno and Phaedo. In Taras, Plato may also have met Timaeus, if there did exist a historical Timaeus. If not, he might have calqued the Timaeus of the Timaeus on Archytas and other Pythagoreans.
The Philosopher and the Tyrant
At the invitation of a philosopher called Dion, Plato left Taras for the court of Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily.
Dion’s father Hipparinus had been instrumental to the rise of Dionysius, first to supreme military commander and then to tyrant. Dionysius had in turn married Hipparinus’ daughter Aristomache, making Dion his brother-in-law and, later, his adviser and close confidant.
Although taken by Dion, Plato had grave reservations about the dissolute Dionysius, who had made himself tyrant by staging an attack upon his own life and using the attack as a pretext to set up a ‘guard’—really, a private army. But Rome had recently been sacked by the Gauls and Plato may have been running out of places to go.
Dionysius sought to surround himself with lettered men to flatter his artistic pretensions and lend himself the aura of an enlightened despot. But he also had a predilection for turning upon them, so that when the dithyrambic poet Philoxenus declined to praise his verses, he condemned him to hard labour in the quarries.
Plato’s criticisms of the sybaritic court of Syracuse angered Dionysius. Plato had argued, among others, that a slave with a just and ordered soul is happier than an unjust tyrant. To test this theory, Dionysius sold Plato into slavery!
According to Diogenes Laertius, the Cyrenaic philosopher Anniceris ransomed Plato from Dionysius for twenty minas.
Upon returning safe and sound to Athens, Plato resolved to remain there once and for all.
The Academy
In 387, the King’s Peace, negotiated by all belligerents and underwritten by the Persian king Artaxerxes II, brought the eight-year-long Corinthian War to an end. Hoping that the Peace would last, Plato purchased a large house some six stadia (around half a mile) beyond the north-western Dipylon gate. The house gave onto the precinct of the Akademeia, named after the Attic hero Hekademos.
The Akademeia contained a sacred grove of olive trees that produced the oil for the victors at the Panathenaic Games. Hippias, the son of Peisistratos, had walled the garden and raised statues and temples. Cimon, the son of Miltiades, had diverted the Cephalus river for irrigation and planted large trees including oriental planes, poplars, and elms. By the time Plato arrived, a gymnasium had been added to one corner. Several athletic and religious events took place or ended within the garden, including the Dionysiac procession from Athens and the torch-lit night race to the altar of Prometheus.
Plato applied for the permission to establish a school—on paper, a thiasos, or religious confraternity. In a nod to the Pythagoreans, he inscribed on the lintel above the door, ‘Let none but geometers enter here.’ Scholars and students took up residence in neighbouring houses, and those of meagre means lodged with others or further out. When he arrived, Eudoxus of Cnidus could only afford an apartment in Piræus, and, each day, walked the seven miles in each direction. Later, his friends and colleagues raised the funds to send him to Heliopolis in Egypt to pursue his study of astronomy and mathematics.
Gatherings often took place in the garden or gymnasium. In many European languages, secondary schools that prepare students for higher education are still, for this reason, called gymnasia. Although Plato privileged the dialectic method, he also encouraged senior members to deliver the occasional public lecture. The Academy’s public lectures became popular, and, after some years, Plato obtained permission to construct a small amphitheatre in which to accommodate them. Plato himself once delivered a lecture entitled, ‘On the Good’, and it may have been the desire to speak to a lay audience that led him to invent striking metaphors such as the sun, line, and cave.
In his forty years as scholarch [head] of the Academy, Plato must have seen through hundreds of students, not least Aristotle, Speusippus, Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Heraclides of Pontus, Hestiæus of Perinthus, and Philip of Opus.
Among all the men, he is known to have admitted at least two women, Axiothea of Phlius and Lastheneia of Mantinea—who were nevertheless required to dress like men so as not to be mistaken for hetairai [courtesans].
The Tyrant’s Son
In 367, twenty years after the foundation of the Academy, the tyrant of Syracuse Dionysius I competed with a play, The Ransom of Hector, which won first prize at the Lenaia festival. Dionysius celebrated by drinking himself to death.
Although Dionysius had married Dion’s sister Aristomache, he had also married Doris of Locri, and while Aristomache bore him four children it was Doris who produced his heir apparent, also called Dionysius. As the older Dionysius lay on his deathbed, Dion tried to talk him into anointing an heir born of Aristomache, who, unlike Doris, was Syracusan and popular with the people. Hearing of this, the younger Dionysius had his father poisoned by way of his doctors.
The paranoid Dionysius had kept his son and heir confined and uneducated, and Dion felt that education might transform Dionysius the Younger if not into a philosopher-king, then at least into a half decent ruler. On this pretext, Dionysius and the Pythagoreans persuaded Plato to return to Syracuse.
Plato did not have high hopes for Dionysius but felt bound to Dion and reluctant to pass over even the slimmest chance of putting theory into practice. When Plato’s trireme docked at Syracuse, Dionysius sacrificed to the gods. But Plato’s arrival, and his grip on Dionysius, did not please the tyrant’s jealous advisors, who accused Dion of plotting against their man.
As his advisors dripped poison into his ear, Dionysius grew suspicious of the able, experienced, and popular Dion, who behaved or acted as ruler in all but name. In 366, Dionysius walked Dion down to the beach and bundled him into a boat bound for Italy. To prevent Plato from protesting or leaving, he removed him to the citadel and placed him under a ‘guard of honour’. In time, Plato cajoled him into letting him go.
Third Time Lucky?
When Plato returned to the Academy, he found a new face in the teenage Aristotle, a man, at last, with real and lasting power. Making the most of exile, Dion soon re-joined them in Athens.
Dionysius did everything in his power to persuade Plato to return to Syracuse, even bargaining with the fates of Dion and his wife. In 361, Plato sailed to Syracuse for a third and last time.
Unsurprisingly, the trip did not go well. When Plato kept on advocating for Dion, Dionysius banished him to the barracks to live amid his hostile guards. Plato would have been reminded of Socrates, of his experience with Alcibiades and Charmides, and of his conviction that virtue cannot be taught.
Fortunately, Dionysius soon returned Plato to the palace. And after a time, Plato once again coaxed the tyrant into letting him leave—promising himself, this time, never to return. Later, Dionysius sent a letter to Athens in which he expressed the fear that Plato would complain about him to the other philosophers at the Academy. Plato curtly replied that he would never be at such a loss of subjects to discuss as to seek one in him.
When Dionysius sold Dion’s estate and forced his wife Arete to marry another, Dion led a revolt, ousting the tyrant and confining him to the citadel. Dion ruled chaotically for three years before being assassinated by Calippus, a close friend and student of Plato who had been bribed by Dionysius.
Although Dion had once been popular with the Syracusans, his failure as tyrant to pursue democratic reforms led them to turn against him—demonstrating the difficulties in setting up anything approaching Plato’s Republican ideal. The same could be said of the broader Syracusan adventure: Dionysius I had loved the arts, Dionysius II Plato, Dion wisdom… and yet.
Final Years
When Dion died in 354, Plato was in his seventies. He was still writing, now faster than ever, and had also developed a set of more mystical unwritten teachings [ágrapha dógmata]. Although predisposed to the highest abstraction, he was keen to show the practical significance of all his theorizing, which he did in his last and longest work, the Laws, which remained unpublished at the time of his death in 348.
The Academy passed to Speusippus, and survived Plato by almost nine centuries. Today, more than twenty-three centuries after his death, Plato’s dialogues remain among the most influential, profound, and moving works ever written.
Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic: power to truth.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.
Free speech is not merely a political right, but a condition of freedom of thought—and of becoming fully human. Read what happens to the mind when it is denied.
Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Greek means something like ‘free speech’ or ‘full expression’. In his ethical treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) presents parrhesia as a trait of the ‘great-souled’ man, or megalopsychos.
The Greeks did not conceive of parrhesia as a right or privilege, but as a virtue or perfection, as well as a moral and social obligation. When Alexander the Great approached Diogenes in Athens and asked whether there was anything he might do for him, Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’
Living in a much more oral society, and having but one word, logos, for both speech and reason, the Greeks understood the close connexion between freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
The connexion runs deeper than might first appear. Speech is not merely the expression of existing thoughts. It is also one of the principal means by which thoughts are formed in the first place. By putting an idea into words, we give it shape and solidity; by submitting it to public scrutiny, we expose it to verification and contradiction; and by defending, modifying, or abandoning it, we teach ourselves what we think. Rhetoric, at its best, is not merely the art of persuading other people, but part of the process by which we reason with them, and with ourselves—hence the tradition of sometimes writing two speeches, one in favour of a position, and the other against.
In Athens, parrhesia underpinned the democracy. For a democracy to flourish, or even merit the name, citizens must be free, able, and willing to speak their mind. Free speech not only enables democracy, but also legitimises its laws and protects it from aspiring tyrants. Undermine free speech, and you undermine democracy—which is why free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Undermine free speech, and you undermine human dignity, which is why free speech is enshrined in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
‘Free speech’ is something of a misnomer. It includes not only speech but also forms of expression, such as writing a book, drawing a cartoon, or burning a flag. Taking inspiration from the French libre expression, we might more accurately and comprehensively refer to ‘free speech’ as ‘freedom of expression’.
Today, many people, especially younger people, believe that freedom of expression can conflict with minority rights, and ought to be curbed to promote a more inclusive society. Is this argument worth entertaining?
The Freedom to Think
Let’s begin by looking more closely at the benefits of free speech. Often, it is by articulating it to others that we work out our position on a particular issue. And in arriving at our opinion, it helps if we are being encouraged, assisted, and challenged—which is why tutorials and a common table are (or ought to be) an important part of university life.
The same principle operates on the scale of entire societies. Intellectual cultures become sophisticated not simply by accumulating information, but by permitting disagreement. An argument produces a counterargument, the counterargument exposes a weakness, and the original argument either collapses or becomes stronger and more subtle. Socrates made a method of this dialectical process, asking awkward questions in gymnasia and marketplaces until received but misguided ideas about courage, justice, and virtue began to unravel.
Even if an opinion is untrue, it may still serve to clarify or reinforce the truth. Moreover, many misguided opinions contain aspects of the truth. Plato himself doubted his Theory of Forms, which nonetheless remains of immense value. Rousseau, who pushed back against the Enlightenment, may have been wrong to idealise the state of nature, but was right to point out that progress also has downsides. Even when securely established, a living truth risks stultifying into a dead dogma if it is not regularly challenged.
This is one reason censorship can have consequences far beyond the particular opinions it suppresses. When certain things cannot safely be said, people learn to avoid not only certain statements, but also certain questions, associations, and lines of enquiry, corrupting the processes that make complex, sophisticated thought possible. That would be why Nazi ideology could take off without ever being grounded, and why Soviet art criticism under Stalin was seldom very enlightening.
Censorship, in other words, does not merely prevent us from saying what we think. In time, it can prevent us from thinking what we might otherwise have thought. We become, as it were, lame human beings, something less than fully human.
Censorship, No-Platforming, and Cancel Culture
So far, we have been talking about the kind of constructive, co-operative discourse that graces academia. But are resentful bigots also entitled to freedom of expression? Or to put it more neutrally, do the intolerant also warrant tolerance?
If bigots were unable to air their opinions, or simply denied a platform, these and they would go unchallenged. Feeling vindicated and persecuted, the bigots would recast themselves as tellers of uncomfortable truths, and, in time, recruit followers. Feeling unheard and unrepresented, this growing mass may resort to violence and destruction, including sabotage of the political system.
Censoring bigots also risks giving their opinions greater appeal and publicity. Prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial put him onto the front pages, and turned him from obscure and discredited historian into a free speech martyr. Banning The Satanic Verses and issuing a fatwa to kill the book’s author and publishers turned the book into a cultural icon.
Conversely, those who engage in ‘cancel culture’ are likely to invite resentment and, in so doing, undermine their cause—to say nothing of the extra-judicial and often disproportionate damage done to the reputations and careers of their targets. In such a climate of fear, self-censorship, even by well-meaning academics and liberals, makes it difficult to calmly and rationally discuss sensitive topics such as immigration and transgender rights.
And here the distinction between free speech and free thought begins to break down. If an academic has an idea but dare not voice it, the idea cannot be tested against the opinions and objections of colleagues. If a student has a doubt but dare not express it, the doubt remains inchoate. If an entire culture learns to avoid certain questions, it may eventually lose not only the answers but even the questions themselves. This is, of course, what some people would like. But to forbid a question is to forbid whatever truths might lie around and beyond it.
Policing Free Speech
Of course, we do already police free speech. In Schenck v. United States (1919), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously argued that free speech does not extend to falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. John Stuart Mill (d. 1873) drew the line at incitement to physical violence.
But beyond this (and a few other cases such as libel, threats, and false advertising), where might we redraw the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable? Socrates, Christ, and Giordano Bruno all lost their lives expressing what came to be regarded as seminal ideas.
Once we had redrawn the line, would the temptation not be to keep redrawing it? The Spanish Inquisition began as one thing and slid into quite another. And it mattered little if some of the inquisitors were well-intentioned.
There is a deeper difficulty. The people empowered to decide which opinions are too dangerous, offensive, or mistaken to be expressed must themselves hold opinions, and their opinions are no more guaranteed to be correct than anybody else’s. To censor an opinion is therefore not to remove judgement from public discourse, but to privilege one judgement over another—and, in many cases, to protect it from the very criticism that might correct it.
Today, the public square has moved online, and it is unaccountable tech giants, rather than the church and state, that are being expected to police free speech—when they might simply begin by ensuring that each individual user is genuine and accountable.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The best response to a bad opinion is not censorship, but good argument and rhetoric. And yes, this might sometimes include mockery and derision and causing offence—although we should not go out of our way to cause offence, as with ‘hate speech’. Our focus ought to be on the facts, and not on the characteristics (although maybe the character) of our opponent.
This brings us back to parrhesia. To the Greeks, speaking freely required more than permission. It required courage: the willingness to say what one believed to be true despite the possibility of ridicule, retribution, or mere umbrage. Socrates exercised that freedom in the face of death; Diogenes before a bloodthirsty king.
In a society in which suffering is medicalised, there is a tendency to conflate psychological offence with physical violence, with the implication that retaliatory physical violence might be justified. But ‘free speech’ includes the right not to listen. Taking offence, as the Stoics insisted, is always a choice. Offence exists not in the insult but in our reaction to it, and our reactions are completely within our control. It is unreasonable to expect a boor to be anything but a boor; if we take offence at his bad behaviour, we have only ourself to blame.
Diogenes called parrhesia the most beautiful thing in the world because freedom of speech is more than the freedom to make a noise. It is the freedom to question, to contradict, to make mistakes, to change our minds, and to find out who we are and who we might be. Without it, rhetoric falls into propaganda, truth into dogma, and thought itself is strangled.
A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Explains Plato’s Theory of Forms and Why It Lies at the Heart of Plato’s Philosophy
‘The eye of the soul must be turned around.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Plato’s Forms have profoundly shaped Western philosophy, psychology, and theology.
In On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche calls Plato ‘the sincerest advocate of the beyond, the great slanderer of life’. For Nietzsche, Plato inaugurates a metaphysical split between truth and appearance that systematically devalues the world we live in.
Yet the dichotomy between truth and appearance has deeper roots in pre-Socratic philosophy. Just as Plato leant upon Heraclitus’ doctrine of flux for his conception of the sensible world (the world as we see it), so he leant upon Parmenides’ unity for his conception of the intelligible world (the world as we think it), which he rendered as the immutable realm of the Forms.
The Genesis of the Forms
Plato’s authorship spanned some fifty years, from the death of Socrates in 399 BCE to his own death in c. 348 BCE. He is traditionally credited with 35 dialogues, although around ten of these are spurious or of doubtful authenticity. Today, the dialogues are often classified into early, middle, and late periods, based on their presumed order of composition.
This matters because the Theory of Forms does not appear fully formed, but gradually emerges from Plato’s development of Socratic questioning into a more systematic metaphysics.
The early dialogues are relatively short and accessible. They are sometimes referred to as the Socratic dialogues because they present a more historically faithful Socrates, typically engaged in ethical investigations of temperance, courage, or friendship with youths, friends, or supposed experts.
From these beginnings, Plato gradually develops his own philosophical system, including the Theory of Forms, which becomes central in middle dialogues such as Phaedo, Symposium, and Republic. In these longer and more literary works, Socrates is less the historical figure and more a mouthpiece for Plato’s developing doctrines. He is accordingly more didactic, putting forward positive theories rather than simply questioning and refuting. Other middle-period doctrines that are unlikely to be Socratic include the Theory of Recollection, the Theory of Reincarnation, and the Theory of the Tripartite Soul—each closely connected to the Forms.
The Forms in the Phaedo
The Phaedo is named after Phaedo of Elis, a follower of Socrates who was present at his death. It is the dialogue in which Plato most explicitly develops the Theory of Forms, although without yet offering a systematic exposition.
It also assumes familiarity with the Meno and the Theory of Recollection, which the Phaedo builds upon.
In the Phaedo, once titled On the Soul, Socrates offers four arguments for the immortality of the soul, among them arguments that draw on recollection and the Theory of Forms. The apparent immortality of the soul enables Socrates to remain calm in the face of his impending execution and provides a metaphysical foundation for the life of philosophy. The dialogue ends with a myth of the afterlife and, of course, the dramatic drinking of hemlock.
Socrates argues that what is compounded is dissoluble, whereas what is uncompounded is indissoluble and therefore unchanging. The Forms (for instance, Beauty itself), which are unchanging, are uncompounded. Their particulars (for instance, a beautiful horse), which are in a constant state of composition and decay, are compounded.
Particulars are apprehended by the senses, but the Forms can only be apprehended by the mind. Since the soul is not apprehended by the senses, Socrates argues that it is akin to the Forms and therefore not subject to dissolution in the same way as bodily things.
The embodied soul uses the body as an instrument of perception, but what the body perceives is in perpetual flux, so that the soul is often drawn into confusion. When the soul turns away from the body and contemplates itself, it moves toward the realm of the unchanging and approaches wisdom.
Upon death, not all souls undergo the same fate. The soul of the philosopher, being least attached to the body, is able to dwell in the realm of the unchanging, where it ‘lives in bliss and is released from the error and folly of men, their fears and wild passions and all other human ills’. Souls that are more attached to bodily desire remain bound to the cycle of embodiment.
Socrates also suggests that Forms explain the deep structure of reality: things are beautiful because they participate in the Form of Beauty, two is two because it participates in the Form of Duality, and so on. A thing that participates in a Form may also participate in other related Forms. For instance, three pencils participate in the Form of Threeness and also in the Form of Oddness. However, opposite Forms such as Even and Odd cannot admit of each other in the same respect. In this way, the soul—being essentially alive—cannot admit its opposite, death, and is therefore closely bound to immortality.
The Symposium: Love as the Engine of Wisdom
In the Symposium, Socrates recounts the teaching of the priestess Diotima on the proper ascent to the love of beauty. A young person begins by loving one beautiful body. He then realises that all beautiful bodies share something in common, and that it is irrational to be attached to only one.
From there, love expands to all beautiful bodies, then to the beauty of the soul, then to beautiful practices and forms of knowledge. Eventually, the lover ascends to the vision of Beauty itself, no longer tied to any particular instance of it.
At the highest stage of this ‘ladder of love’, the soul apprehends Beauty itself rather than its appearances. In doing so, it comes as close as possible, within human life, to something stable and eternal.
The Republic: The Form of the Good
In Book VI of the Republic, in the context of educating the philosopher-kings, Plato introduces the elusive Form of the Good. It is by apprehending the Good that the philosopher becomes fit to rule, since it is the source of intelligibility and value in all things.
Because the Good cannot be directly defined, Socrates conveys it indirectly through three famous metaphors: the sun, the divided line, and the cave (discussed in a separate article).
Legacy of the Forms
In the Phaedo, the Theory of Forms is presented as the most plausible account of reality, without sustained criticism. In later dialogues, Plato becomes more self-critical; in the Parmenides, the Theory of Forms is subjected to a severe and systematic critique.
However arresting it may be, the Theory of Forms is never fully finalised. It becomes less prominent in the late dialogues and increasingly problematised from within.
Part of the pleasure of reading Plato is that he is thinking with us rather than simply instructing us. The dialogues are not dogmatic systems but staged explorations of philosophical possibility.
In any case, our interest in the Theory of Forms is less in its strict logical coherence than in its enduring influence. The Phaedo helped establish a set of deep dualities that have shaped much of Western thought: soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense perception, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and earth.
In later Western traditions, these distinctions were often intensified into moral and metaphysical hierarchies. The body is frequently associated with limitation, desire, and error, while the soul or intellect is associated with truth and transcendence. Yet this inheritance is uneven: other traditions, including various strands of Eastern philosophy and practice, place less emphasis on such sharp oppositions and more on integration, discipline, or transformation within embodied life.
At the same time, Plato’s vision is not simply world-denying. The discipline of detachment in the Phaedo and the Symposium also points toward a kind of freedom from compulsion—whether read metaphysically, ethically, or psychologically.
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