Upon his return to Athens at around 40 years of age, Plato founded the first known institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, named for its location in the Grove of Academus. Later in life, after the death of Socrates, Plato traveled around Egypt, Italy, Sicily, and Cyrene, Libya. Well before his encounter with Socrates, Plato was known to accompany philosophers such as Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus. And yet modern scholars are in doubt, since the name “Plato” was not uncommon in the Athens of Plato’s day. Diogenes Laertius also reports that the philosopher’s name was Aristocles, for his grandfather, but that his wrestling coach dubbed him “Platon,” meaning “broad,” either on account of his robust physique, or the width of his forehead, or eloquence of his speech. The family of his mother, Perictione, boasted a relationship with the great Athenian legislator Solon. According to Diogenes Laertius, who lived many centuries later than the philosophers about whom he was writing, Plato was born to Ariston, an Athenian aristocrat who traced his lineage to Codrus, the king of Athens, and to Melanthus, the king of Messina. There are few contemporary sources for the life of Plato. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” No area of inquiry seems foreign to him: his writings investigate ethics, politics, mathematics, metaphysics, logic, aesthetics, and epistemology in tremendous depth and breadth. Our very conception of philosophy-of rigorous thinking concerning the true situation of man, the nature of the whole, and the perplexity of being-owes a great debt to his work. Plato is one of the most brilliant and far-reaching writers to have ever lived.
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