How did Plato Impact the world?

Answer 1

In the dialogues for which Plato is most celebrated and admired, Socrates is concerned with human and political virtue, has a distinctive personality, and friends and enemies who "travel" with him from dialogue to dialogue. This is not to say that Socrates is consistent: a man who is his friend in one dialogue may be an adversary or subject of his mockery in another. For example, Socrates praises the wisdom of Euthyphro many times in the Cratylus, but makes him look like a fool in the Euthyphro. He disparages sophists generally, and Prodicus specifically in the Apology, yet tells Theaetetus in his namesake dialogue that he admires Prodicus and has directed many pupils to him. In Cratylus (384b-c), Socrates says that he studied with Cratylus, and took his one-drachma course because he could not afford the full fifty-drachma course. Socrates' ideas are also not consistent within or between or among dialogues.

Answer 2

How about I give you a real answer, instead of one just copied from Wikipedia? Plato impacted the world, at least the Western world, enormously. Alfred North Whitehead, an early 20th century philosopher, once said (more or less), "The history of Western thought is just a series of footnotes to Plato." And there's a sense in which that's true. The philosophers before Plato, the so-called pre-Socratics because they came before Socrates, wrote on increasingly obscure topics, like whether Being was changeless or ever-changing, but Plato brought philosophy back to the real world. He was the first one, at least in our historical record, to make ethics the subject of philosophy and its focus. All of his philosophy, no matter how obscure, is all directed toward answering the basic question, "What should people do?" His view on the nature of reality was that there was a material realm, which is impure and imperfect, and a pure, perfect world of spiritual world. This sounds like common sense, but no one had said it before Plato. And now it's one of the most deeply ingrained ideas in our civilization. It's one of the central ideas of Christianity, which sees the material world as an imperfect representation of the higher spiritual world of God. St. Augustine, who combined Christianity with Plato's philosophy, is widely regarded as the most important thinker in Christianity after Jesus and Paul. Plato has truly set the stage for all of Western thought. He laid out every question in philosophy - metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic - and is the foundation for every thinker who has subsequently commented on any of them, whether he is aware of it or not.

Answer 3

Only 13% or so of the world's population has ever enjoyed post-secondary education. Anyone who has studied Plato's work in depth is one of the fortunate ones and one of select group of individuals.

Brittany Spears probably affects more people on a given day.

Answer 4

I have also asked the same question two times, and didn't get an answer

Answer 5

In very little, yet a moral man/woman would know and yet understand only that in which they were proficent