Agathon is portrayed by Plato as a handsome young man, well dressed, of polished manners, courted by the fashion, wealth and wisdom of Athens, and dispensing hospitality with ease and refinement.

Plato is depicted as an old man seated at the end of the bed.

Both Herodotus and Plato record variations of an anecdote in which Themistocles responded with subtle sarcasm to an undistinguished man who complained that the great politician owed his fame merely to the fact that he came from Athens.

Lavater later described Mendelssohn in his book on physiognomy, " Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe " ( 1775 – 1778 ), as " a companionable, brilliant soul, with piercing eyes, the body of an Aesop — a man of keen insight, exquisite taste and wide erudition [...] frank and open-hearted "— ending his public praise with the wish of Mendelssohn recognizing, " together with Plato and Moses ... the crucified glory of Christ ".

They believed in a prisca theologia, the doctrine that a single, true theology exists, which threads through all religions, and which was given by God to man in antiquity and passed through a series of prophets, which included Zoroaster and Plato.

Plato, in The Republic, numbered Simonides with Bias and Pittacus among the wise and blessed, even putting into the mouth of Socrates the words " it is not easy to disbelieve Simonides, for he is a wise man and divinely inspired ," but in his dialogue Protagoras, Plato numbered Simonides with Homer and Hesiod as precursors of the sophist.

The first man to call himself a sophist, according to Plato, was Protagoras, whom he presents as teaching that all virtue is conventional.

It was Protagoras who claimed that " man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not ," which Plato takes to indicate a radical perspectivalism, where some things seem to be one way for one person ( and so actually are that way ) and to be another way to another person ( and so actually are that way ); consequently, one cannot in any way look to nature for guidance regarding how to live one's life.

However, in the Symposium, Plato seemed to endorse homosexuality, describing it as a " higher form of love " than that between a man and woman.

Plato ’ s great work of the middle period, the Republic, is devoted to answering a challenge made by a sophist Thrasymachus, that conventional morality, particularly the ‘ virtue ’ of justice, actually prevents the strong man from achieving eudaimonia.

In contrast, Plato argues that the unjust man ’ s soul, without the virtues, is chaotic and at war with itself, so that even if he were able to satisfy most of his desires, his lack of inner harmony and unity thwart any chance he has of achieving eudaimonia.

The three scholars set out to demonstrate that Christians could hold their own in conversations with learned Greek-speaking intellectuals and that Christian faith, while it was against many of the ideas of Plato and Aristotle ( and other Greek philosophers ), was an almost scientific and distinctive movement with the healing of the soul of man and his union with God at its center — one best represented by monasticism.

When Plato gave Socrates ' definition of man as " featherless bipeds " and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, " Behold!

The ancient historian Herodotus cited him as " the best and most honourable man in Athens ", and he received similarly reverent treatment in the writing of the philosopher Plato.

Harold Bloom noted that " Pater praises Plato for Classic correctness, for a conservative centripetal impulse, against his own Heraclitean Romanticism ," but " we do not believe him when he presents himself as a centripetal man ".

He contrasts the account of the creation of the universe and of man, on which, together with the history contained in the earlier chapters of Genesis, he comments at great length but with singularly little intelligence, with the statements of Plato, " reputed the wisest of all the Greeks ", of Aratus, who had the insight to assert that the earth was spherical, and other Greek writers on whom he pours contempt as mere ignorant retailers of stolen goods.

Plato followed Socrates in concentrating on man.

In other words, the activity of the Original Essence manifested itself in the creation of man, who at the same time is the image of the Heavenly Man and of the universe, just as with Plato and Philo the idea of man, as microcosm, embraces the idea of the universe or macrocosm.

In Plato there is an incipient tendency towards the apotheosis of nous … Such philosophical coolness will mean little to the ordinary man who is hard pressed by everyday cares.

The way in which Aristotle sketches the highest good for man involving both a practical and a theoretical side, with the two sides necessary for each other, is also in the tradition of Socrates and Plato, as opposed to pre-Socratic philosophy.

Plato and Aristotle teach that the highest thing in man is reason and therefore, the purpose of human perfection lies with the activity of reason ; i. e. the ' theoretic ' or contemplative life.

In the analysis of " Plato talks with his pupils ", " Plato " needs to be replaced with something like " the man who was the teacher of Aristotle ".

Agathon has been thought to be the subject of Lovers ' Lips, an epigram attributed to Plato:

In the Gorgias written years later Plato has Socrates contemplating the possibility of himself on trial before the Athenians: he says he would be like a doctor prosecuted by a pastry chef before a jury of children.

In his dialogues ( e. g. Republic 399e, 592a ), Plato has Socrates utter, " by the dog " ( kai me ton kuna ), " by the dog of Egypt ", " by the dog, the god of the Egyptians " ( Gorgias, 482b ), for emphasis.

It has been used by various theologians and philosophers over the centuries, from the ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle to the medievals ( e. g., St. Thomas Aquinas ) and beyond.

Plato was therefore a metaphysical and epistemological dualist, an outlook that modern idealism has striven to avoid: Plato's thought cannot therefore be counted as idealist in the modern sense.

In Republic by Plato, the character Thrasymachus argues that justice is the interest of the strong — merely a name for what the powerful or cunning ruler has imposed on the people.

Besides Zarathushtra's Gathas, Plato gives the earliest surviving account of a " natural theology ", around 360 BC, in his dialogue " Timaeus " he states " Now the whole Heaven, or Cosmos, ... we must first investigate concerning it that primary question which has to be investigated at the outset in every case ,— namely, whether it has existed always, having no beginning of generation, or whether it has come into existence, having begun from some beginning ".

Although it was codified in the 19th century, when all the social sciences were established, political science has ancient roots ; indeed, it originated almost 2, 500 years ago with the works of Plato and Aristotle.

The contemporary stereotype of rhetoric as " empty speech " or " empty words " reflects a radical division of rhetoric from knowledge, a division that has had influential adherents within the rhetorical tradition, most notably Plato and Peter Ramus.

For Plato and Aristotle, dialectic involves persuasion, so when Aristotle says that rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic, he means that rhetoric as he uses the term has a domain or scope of application that is parallel to but different from the domain or scope of application of dialectic.

While reincarnation has been a matter of faith in some communities from an early date it has also frequently been argued for on principle, as Plato does when he argues that the number of souls must be finite because souls are indestructible, Benjamin Franklin held a similar view.

And it has been claimed, though controversially, that there were elements of socialist thought in the politics of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

The notion of a static unchanging Form and its identity with Substance represents the metaphysical view that has come to be held as an assumption by the vast majority of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato and Aristotle, as it was something they agreed on.

Plato, in his dialogue The Republic Book 6 ( 509D – 513E ), has Socrates explain through the literary device of a divided line his fundamental metaphysical ideas as four separate but logically connected models of the world.

It has been suggested that Plato may have heard legends about this, and used them as the germ of his story of Atlantis.

* Arcesilaus, Greek philosopher, who has become the sixth head of the Greek Academy founded by Plato ( b. c. 316 BC )

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy since Plato has misunderstood what it means for something " to be ", tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about Being itself.

Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, beginning with Plato, has left its traces in every stage of Western thought.

For example, in the brewing industry, the Plato table, which lists sucrose concentration by weight against true SG, were originally ( 20 ° C / 4 ° C ) that is based on measurements of the density of sucrose solutions made at laboratory temperature ( 20 ° C ) but referenced to the density of water at 4 ° C which is very close to the temperature at which water has its maximum density of ρ () equal to 0. 999972 g / cm < sup > 3 </ sup > ( or 62. 43 lb < sub > m </ sub >· ft < sup >− 3 </ sup >).

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's " lived experience ;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.

The ancient Greek poet Hesiod has in his account of the birth of the gods and creation of the world ( i. e., in his Theogony ) that Chaos begot the primordial deities: Eros, Gaia ( Earth ) and Tartarus, who begot Erebus ( Darkness ) and Nyx ( Night ), and Plato echoes this genealogy in the Timaeus 40e, 41e where the familiar Titan and Olympian gods are sired by Heaven and Earth.