About the author …

Early in life, Plato became interested in painting and poetry but soon became discouraged upon comparing his writing with Homer's verse. Chancing to hear the discourses of Socrates, he became fascinated with philosophy. Following the death of his mentor and time spent abroad, Plato founded the Academy, a school of philosophy named after Academus, the public garden in Athens where he had lectured years earlier. At the grove of Academus, persons would gather before monuments placed among the trees along the stream Cephissus. There Plato taught that the eternal soul existing before birth knows the essences of things, and the soul during life seeks to recollect what it knew in its former state: viz. the apprehension of the Ideas or Forms—the immaterial essences of all that is real. The everyday world, he thinks, is a changing, vague imitation of the perfect beauty of universal concepts or the "World of Forms." Moreover, in his dialogue Ion, Plato debunks the classical ideal of the artist having an irrationally inspired intuition of the eternal world of the Ideal Forms. Even so, Plato's alternative account of the soul's quest for perfect beauty as told by Diotima in The Symposium perhaps has had more influence on Western æsthetics than his imitation theory of art expressed in Ion and in Book X of the Republic. The account of the divinely inspired artist described in the Symposium, whose work represents the quest for eternal truth, influenced Western philosophy through the fashioning of the neo-Platonic theory of Plotinus.