Plato Plato

The history of Western philosophy can be recast as a series of footnotes to Plato s work, according to some. Plato (427 347 BCE) was born into an aristocratic family of Athens and was destined for an ambitious political career. As an obscure and reticent youngster, he followed Socrates. A sworn enemy of the materialist and relativistic philosophers of his times, Plato transcended his early debt to Socratic views and developed his own transcendentalist mystical theory of Forms.