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Brief Lives

Plato (427-347 BC)

William Dante Deacon looks at the life of a founding father of Western philosophy.

Among the many eulogies of Plato (real name Aristocles, 427-347 BC), it has become a common trend to reference A.N. Whitehead’s famous quote that a “general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” However, one need only to look to Whitehead’s student and collaborator Bertrand Russell to sour that grandeur. Russell treated the Athenian “with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism” (A History of Western Philosophy, 1945).

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