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Plato and the Academy

Plato’s dialogues are where philosophia is first defined. It starts in a feeling: “this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy” (Theaetetus 155d, tr. Fowler). The lover of wisdom “desires all wisdom, not a part and a part not” (Republic 475b, tr. Shorey).

“Those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead”, and “the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men” (Phaedo 64a, 67e, tr. Fowler); Cicero later put it in Latin as Tota enim philosophorum vita … commentatio mortis est, the whole life of philosophers is a rehearsal for death (Tusculan Disputations 1.74). In a passage of the Theaetetus that begins with the philosopher’s leisure, Socrates says that “to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise” (176b). The good it serves is also the city’s: “unless … our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intelligence … there can be no cessation of troubles … for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either” (Republic 473d).

Dialectic is the way: “is not dialectics the only process of inquiry that advances in this manner, doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself in order to find confirmation there?” (Republic 533c). And what it reaches at the end cannot be set down like other learning. In the Seventh Letter, whose authenticity is disputed, the writer says of his own subject that “it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark” (341c–d, tr. Bury).

The school Plato left went on under his successors, and the ancients counted its phases. Of Arcesilaus, Diogenes Laertius writes: “With him begins the Middle Academy; he was the first to suspend his judgement owing to the contradictions of opposing arguments. He was also the first to argue on both sides of a question” (4.28, tr. Hicks). Sextus Empiricus counted “three” Academies, adding that “some, however, add as a fourth” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.220, tr. Bury). In Cicero’s Academica, Varro holds that the Academics and the Peripatetics, Aristotle’s school, were one teaching under two names, rebus congruentes nominibus differebant, agreeing in substance and differing in name (1.17).