A quotation from Plato
Quotation
All enquiry and all learning is but recollection.
Plato
He saw a world behind the world. The Forms are real; what we see are shadows.
Plato was Socrates’ most devoted student, and after his teacher’s death, he spent years traveling before returning to Athens to found the Academy, the Western world’s first institution of higher learning. His dialogues are philosophy as literature: Socrates arguing about justice, beauty, the good, and the nature of reality itself. His theory of Forms, that the visible world is a reflection of eternal, perfect originals, shaped metaphysics for two millennia.
Plato vs. Aristotle
Ideal Forms vs. Empirical Realism: Is truth transcendent or immanent in the physical world?
The rupture between Plato and Aristotle is Western philosophy's foundational debate. In Raphael's fresco The School of Athens, Plato points upward to the transc…
Explore Debate→More Lines from Plato
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“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils.”
Understanding This Quotation
What does Plato mean by this quotation?
He saw a world behind the world. The Forms are real; what we see are shadows. Plato was Socrates’ most devoted student, and after his teacher’s death, he spent years traveling before returning to Athens to found the Academy, the Western world’s first institution of higher learning. His dialogues a…
What was the context or school of thought behind this idea?
Plato articulated this thought in Meno. Can virtue be taught? Before answering, Socrates calls over an uneducated slave boy and draws squares in the sand until the boy works out a geometrical truth he was never told. From this comes the cla…