PLATO, with Socrates and Aristotle, is the founder of the Western
intellectual tradition. Like his mentor Socrates, he was
essentially a practical philosopher who found the abstract theory
and visionary schemes of many contemporary thinkers misguided and
sterile. He was born about 429 B.C. in Athens, the son of a
prominent family that had long been involved in the city's
politics. Extremely little survives of the history of Plato's
youth, but he was raised in the shadow of the great Peloponnesian
War, and its influence must have caused him to reject the political
career open to him and to become a follower of the brilliantly
unorthodox Socrates, the self-proclaimed "gadfly" of Athens.
Socrates' death in 399 B.C. turned Plato forever from politics, and
in the next decade he wrote his first dialogues, among them Apology
and Euthyphro. At age forty, Plato visited Italy and Syracuse, and
upon his return he founded the Academy-Europe's first university-in
a sacred park on the outskirts of Athens. The Academy survived for
a millennium, finally closed by the emperor Justinian in A.D. 529.
Plato hoped his school would train its pupils to carry out a life
of service and to investigate questions of science and mathematics.
Plato's old age was probably devoted to teaching and writing, he
died in Athens in 348 B.C.
"Must we not acknowledge...that in each of us there are the same
principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from
the individual they pass into the State?"
What does it mean to be good? What enables us to distinguish right
from wrong? And how should human virtues be translated into a just
society? These are the questions that Plato sought to answer in
this monumental work of moral and political philosophy, a book
surpassed only by the Bible in its formative influence on two
thousand years of Western thought.
In the course of its tautly reasoned Socratic dialogues, The
Republic accomplishes nothing less than an anatomy of the soul and
an exhaustive description of a State that both mirrors and enforces
the soul's ideal harmony. The resulting text is at once mystical
and elegantly logical and may be read as a template for the
societies in which most of us live today.
Vintage Classics are quality paperback editions of the world's
greatest written works. They are durably bound and are printed
exclusively on acid-free paper.
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