12 ideas from Plato, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.
Plato imagined prisoners chained in a cave since birth, facing a wall, seeing only shadows cast by objects behind them. To the prisoners, the shadows are reality itself. One escape…
— Plato, The Republic, Book VII
In Plato's dialogue, Socrates asks the priest Euthyphro this question about piety, and neither answer is comfortable: if good is whatever a god commands, morality becomes arbitrary…
— Plato, Euthyphro
In Plato's Republic, Glaucon tells of a shepherd named Gyges who finds a ring that makes him invisible, and uses it to seduce a queen, murder a king, and seize a throne. Glaucon ar…
— Plato, The Republic
In Plato's Republic, Socrates likens democracy to a ship whose sailors brawl over the helm, flatter the crowd, and dismiss the one navigator who actually understands the stars and …
— Plato, The Republic, Book VI
In Plato's dialogue Meno, Socrates is challenged with a puzzle: if you don't know what virtue is, you can't recognize it even if you find it — and if you already know it, there's n…
— Plato, Meno
In the Republic, Plato has Socrates propose a 'noble lie': a myth telling citizens they were born from the earth itself, with different metals — gold, silver, bronze — mixed into t…
— Plato, The Republic
When the Oracle at Delphi declared Socrates the wisest man alive, he set out to prove it wrong by questioning politicians, poets and craftsmen who claimed expertise. He concluded h…
— Plato, Apology
Protagoras claimed 'man is the measure of all things' - of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. If the same wind feels cold to you and warm to me, he argued, th…
— Plato, Theaetetus
In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the soul as a charioteer steering two winged horses: one obedient and driven by honor, the other unruly and driven by appetite. Reason's task isn't…
— Plato, Phaedrus
Plato's Republic argues a just city needs philosophers as kings, or kings turned genuine philosophers, since only someone trained to see truth over power or popularity can rule for…
— Plato, The Republic
Plato describes prisoners chained since birth facing a cave wall, watching only the shadows cast by objects passed behind them, and mistaking the shadows for real things because th…
— Plato, The Republic, Book VII
In 399 BC, roughly 500 Athenian jurors convicted Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth, verdicts shaped by the city's recent trauma under the Thirty Tyrants. Offered a chanc…
— Plato, Phaedo