Academy Plato

The center of Greek philosophy shifted to Athens around 400 B.C.E., with the rise of Plato and his school, the Academy. Plato (428-347 B.C.E.) was an Athenian from a wealthy, patrician family. He had been the foremost pupil of Socrates (470-399 b.c.e.), but, unlike his teacher, he did not reject the necessity of understanding the physical world. For Socrates, only the Ideal and the nature of man were worthy of study. The Ideal was perfect, mathematical, and divine. Although Plato accepted the superiority of the Ideal over the material, he was also interested in human existence, writing extensively about politics and social organization. It followed that even if the material world might be an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, to make the best of one s life a person needed to understand both the material world and the Ideal. The best presentation of Plato s ideas is found in the Timaeus, which includes a description of the structure of the universe. 

Plato s most famous pupil was Aristotle. Aristotle came from Stageirus, on the Chalcidic peninsula of northern Greece, where his father, Nicomachus, was a physician. Aristotle would probably have followed his father into medicine, since medical education and practice were passed down from father to son, but Nicomachus died when Aristotle was about 10 years old. He was raised by a relative, and, in 367 b.c.e., at the age of 17, Aristotle became a student at the Academy. He stayed for 20 years, first as a student and later as a teacher. When Plato died, Aristotle may have expected to become the head of the Academy in Athens, but the position went to Speusippus, who was Plato s nephew. Little is known about Speusippus he seems to have followed some of Plato s ideas but rejected Plato s theory of forms. Aristotle left the Academy, partly because of his situation at the Academy and partly because of political turmoil in Athens. He traveled to Macedonia, where he tutored Alexander, son of King Philip. When Alexander became king, he supported Aristotle s creation of the Lyceum, a rival school in Athens. 

But this method of doubt which reason sanctions as long as it encourages us merely to avoid arguments about words to which we can attach no clear and precise ideas, to proportion our belief in a proposition to its degree of probability and to determine for the various species of knowledge the limits of certainty to which we can attain - this form of doubt, if it extends to ascertained truth, if it attacks the principles of morality, becomes either stupidity or madness, it favours ignorance and corruption, and it is to these lengths that the Sophists went who succeeded the first disciples of Plato in the Academy. 

However, this exaggerated scepticism did not carry with it the whole of the Academy. On the contrary, the doctrine which was drawn from Plato s Dialogues, that there is an eternal idea of the just, the beautiful and the virtuous, independent of the interests of men, of their conventions, even of their existence, an idea, which, once it is imprinted in the soul, becomes for us the principle of duty and the rule of conduct, continued to be expounded in his school, and served as a foundation for the teaching of morality. 

Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it to the Academy, and said, This is Plato s man. On which acconnt this addition was made to the definition, with broad flat nails . 

There is a long history for us to recognize polymers. Let us start with the early evolution of our molecular views (Rupp 2005). As early as in the middle of 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his follower Democritus suggested that, an indivisible minimum substance called atoms constituted our world. Almost at the same time, Empedocles proposed that the world was formed by four elements, i.e., water, air, fire, and earth. Later on, Plato set up the Academy at Athens, inherited the atomic theory, and also advocated the four-element theory on the basis of the formal logic system of geometries. 

Geometry is the most significant topic for engineering and architectural design, which has been indicated as the most significant aspect by Plato, who has written at the entrance of his academy about 300 BC as,... 

The first definition belongs to the Stoics and Aristo, the second to the Old Academy and Peripatos. C. s account of the development of ethics after Plato is closely based on the ideas of Antiochus of Ascalon (cf. i. 54), who tried to demonstrate the similarity in all but terminology of Stoic, Peripatetic, and early Academic ethics. For a valuable assessment of his importance see now J. Barnes, Antiochus of Ascalon, in Philosophia TogatUy ed. Griffin and Barnes (Oxford, 1989), 51-96. 

PLATO (429-347). Pupil of Socrates, founder of the Academy, teacher of Aristotle and many others. Cicero admired his dialogues and translated some of them his Republic and Laws are the literary models for On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, although Cicero repeatedly attacks his political ideas as unrealistic and inhumane. 

SPEUSIPPUS (fourth century). Plato s nephew and successor as head of the Academy from 347 to 339. 

XENOCRATES (396-314). Pupil of Plato and third head of the Academy. 

The distinction between Aristotelian philosophy and that of modern science is somewhat subtle, since Aristotle himself helped to define many fields in modern science, e.g. mechanics and biology. To illustrate this point, we describe some aspects of his physics [2]. When Aristotle arrived at Plato s academy, he found that Plato did not welcome scientific inquiry. Rather, Plato emphasized the reality of abstract ideals, which one could comprehend only by avoiding sensory perception. Aristotle developed a more practical ideology by postulating that reality consists in tangible... 

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