Plato and the Academy
Dialogues on justice, knowledge and reality, and the first institution resembling a university.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 80 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Plato founds the Academy around 387 BCE, which runs for some nine hundred years. His dialogues argue that the changing world we perceive is a shadow of unchanging Forms, that knowledge is recollection, and — in the Republic — that a just city would be ruled by philosophers and would censor its poets. Whitehead's remark that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato is an exaggeration that is hard to improve on.