Platonic Philosophy and the Academy

Plato’s dialogues use Socrates and other speakers to test claims about virtue, knowledge, rhetoric, love, justice and the ideal city. The Academy became a long-lived philosophical institution in Athens.

The context matters because Plato’s writing links philosophy to civic crisis after the trial of Socrates, the failures of Athenian politics and the search for stable definitions of justice and goodness.

It is useful for editions of the dialogues and for fiction about Socrates, Plato, Athenian education and the intellectual aftermath of the Peloponnesian War.