13 Facts About Plato

1. Plato was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece.

2. Plato was an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy.

3. Plato was a wrestler, and Dicaearchus went so far as to say that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games.

4. Ambrose believed that Plato met Jeremiah in Egypt and was influenced by his ideas.

5. Plato introduced the concept of form as distinct from matter, and that the physical world is an imitation of an eternal mathematical world.

6. For Numenius it is just that Plato wrote so many philosophical works, whereas Pythagoras' views were originally passed on only orally.

7. Plato helped to distinguish between pure and applied mathematics by widening the gap between "arithmetic", now called number theory and "logistic", now called arithmetic.

8. That the modern theory of justified true belief as knowledge, which Gettier addresses, is equivalent to Plato's is accepted by some scholars but rejected by others.

9. The role of dialectic in Plato's thought is contested but there are two main interpretations: a type of reasoning and a method of intuition.

10. Plato's thought is often compared with that of his most famous student, Aristotle, whose reputation during the Western Middle Ages so completely eclipsed that of Plato that the Scholastic philosophers referred to Aristotle as "the Philosopher".

11. Plato is referenced by Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar Maimonides in his The Guide for the Perplexed.

12. Many of these commentaries on Plato were translated from Arabic into Latin and as such influenced Medieval scholastic philosophers.

13. Many of the greatest early modern scientists and artists who broke with Scholasticism and fostered the flowering of the Renaissance, with the support of the Plato-inspired Lorenzo, saw Plato's philosophy as the basis for progress in the arts and sciences.