Plato's parable allegory of the cave expresses his doctrine of Ideas or Forms - Essay Example

ad.’ This may have been “derived either from the width of his shoulders, the results of training for wrestling, or from the breadth of his style, or from the size of his forehead” (Rowe, qtd. in O’Connor and Robertson, Plato). His father, Ariston, died when Plato was a young man and his mother, Perictione, married Pyrilampes, in whose house Plato lived. Plato served in the military from 409 – 404 B.C. during the Peloponnesian War. He then participated in the Athenian oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 B.C. but soon repudiated their violence.

His disillusionment with Athenian politics was complete with the execution of Socrates in 399 B.C. which had a deep impact on his life and thinking. Leaving Athens, Plato traveled to Egypt, Sicily and Italy, where he was influenced by Pythagoras’ work to conclude that valid scientific thought must necessarily be expressed in mathematical terms. He again served as a soldier. On returning to Athens in 387 B.C. Plato founded a school of philosophy and science in a grove belonging to man called Academos: the origin of the word ‘Academy.

’ Aristotle was the most renowned of the Academicians. The aim of the academy was to instruct young men to become the ideal statesmen who would usher in the ideal world of Plato’s writings. Except for an intervening period of a few years as tutor to Dionysus II of Syracuse, Plato continued in his role at the Academy until his death in 347 B.C. Plato’s life shows that, in addition to being a philosopher, “he was a man of the world, an experienced soldier, widely traveled, with close contacts with many of the leading men of affairs, both in own city and elsewhere” (Field, qtd.

in O’Connor and Robertson, Plato). Plato’s Academy flourished for nine hundred years, as the longest surviving university known, until it was disbanded by the Emperor Justinian as a pagan establishment. Plato’s Dialogues assured his place “among the greatest writers of the world”