PLATO (c. 427-347 BCE)
Ancient Greek philosopher, and one of the most famous philosophers in all of history. He
was an objective idealist, and ideologist of the slave-owning
aristocracy. He was a student of Socrates and wrote most of
his philosophical works in the form of dialogues wherein Socrates is the dominant speaker.
It is often difficult to tell whether the views put forward in these dialogues were actually
those of Socrates, or are really only those of Plato in the mouth of Socrates.
One of the reasons that Plato is so important
in the history of philosophy is that idealist philosophers ever since have appealed to his
authority to back up their own views. The idealist bourgeois philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead once went so far as to claim that “The safest general characterization of the
European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
[Process and Reality (1929)] To the extent that this is true, it is a crying shame,
and a very sad commentary on European philosophy!
Plato was the teacher of
Aristotle, though Aristotle rebelled to a considerable degree
against Plato’s philosophical idealism, and was much more down to earth.
See also:
Philosophical doggerel about
Plato.
Important early Russian Marxist leader and theoretician, who played a very positive role in
building and promoting the Marxist movement in Tsarist Russia, but who in his later years broke
with Lenin and sided with the Mensheviks. Nevertheless, his writings on Marxist philosophy are
still very valuable and well worth serious study.