The Dialogues of Plato

It has famously been asserted that all Western philosophy is merely a series of footnotes to Plato. As one of the greatest minds ever to put pen to paper, Plato’s dialogues, written in Athens in the fourth century BCE, have deeply shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of the world. Through staged conversations exploring justice, goodness, knowledge, virtue, beauty, love, and the nature of reality itself, Plato developed ideas that would profoundly influence Neoplatonism, early Christianity, Jewish and Islamic philosophy, political theory, and most of the Western philosophical tradition. Through Neoplatonism and later esoteric currents, his influence touches other Library authors such as Blavatsky, Steiner, and Huxley. Even his dialogical style left a lasting mark, demonstrating that truth is often discovered not through lectures and pronouncements but through questioning, conversation, and the patient testing of ideas. To read Plato is to discover that the most urgent questions of our own lives were being asked, with equal urgency, two and a half thousand years ago.