An interactive guide to Plato's dialogues, key philosophical ideas, interlocutors, and life — with search, sorting, and Stephanus references.
Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher and the central figure of the Western philosophical tradition. Born into an aristocratic family — his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the Thirty Tyrants — he grew up during the Peloponnesian War and witnessed both the oligarchic terror of 404 BCE and the democratic trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE. According to later ancient biographers, these experiences turned him away from the political career typical of his class and toward philosophy.
After Socrates' death Plato traveled to Megara, possibly to Egypt, and to southern Italy and Sicily, where he encountered Pythagorean philosophy and made the first of three visits to the court of Syracuse. Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world, where he taught for the rest of his life. His most famous student, Aristotle, joined at seventeen and remained for twenty years. Ancient sources record two further trips to Syracuse (367 and 361 BCE), involving the court of the young tyrant Dionysius II; both ended in political failure and personal danger.
He died in Athens around 348 BCE, reportedly at a wedding feast, in his eightieth year. The surviving Platonic corpus includes some 36 dialogues — nearly all complete — spanning epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, political theory, aesthetics, philosophy of language, cosmology, mathematics, and theology. (A collection of 13 letters also circulates under his name, but their authenticity is widely disputed among scholars.) Alfred North Whitehead famously called the European philosophical tradition "a series of footnotes to Plato."