Thinkers Timeline

Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was a philosopher in ancient Athens, Greece. He wrote nothing himself — everything we know about him comes from the writings of his students, especially Plato. He spent his life in the streets and public spaces of Athens, asking people questions about the things they claimed to know — justice, courage, virtue, knowledge. He was famously described as the wisest man in Athens, but said this could only be true because he alone knew that he knew nothing. In 399 BCE he was put on trial by the Athenian government, charged with corrupting the youth and not respecting the gods. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by drinking poison. He refused to escape when he had the chance, saying a philosopher must obey the law even when it is unjust.

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher. He is one of the most important thinkers in human history. The whole tradition of Western philosophy has been called 'a series of footnotes to Plato'. He was born around 428 BCE in Athens, the great Greek city of his time. He died around 348 BCE, aged about 80. He came from a wealthy aristocratic family. His real name was probably Aristocles. 'Plato' (meaning 'broad' in Greek) seems to have been a nickname, possibly from his physical build. As a young man, he expected to enter politics. The political life of Athens, however, made him turn away. He was a student of Socrates, the philosopher who walked the streets of Athens questioning everyone. In 399 BCE, when Plato was about 29, the Athenian democracy executed Socrates on charges of corrupting the young and disrespecting the gods. Plato never got over it. The death shaped his philosophy and his deep distrust of democracy. After Socrates' death, Plato travelled. He went to southern Italy, Sicily, and possibly Egypt. Around 387 BCE, he returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school for philosophy. The Academy lasted in some form for nearly 900 years. Aristotle studied there as a young man. Plato wrote about 35 dialogues, almost all of which survive. The dialogues are conversations, usually with Socrates as the main speaker. They cover almost every philosophical topic: justice, knowledge, beauty, love, the soul, government, education. The Republic is his most famous. The Symposium and the Phaedo are also widely read. He died in his eighties, still teaching at the Academy.

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher. He is one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western philosophy and science. He was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small city in northern Greece. His father was a doctor to the royal court of Macedonia. At seventeen, Aristotle travelled to Athens and joined the Academy, the school founded by Plato. He stayed there for twenty years as a student and then as a teacher. When Plato died in 347 BCE, Aristotle left Athens. He travelled, taught, and did natural history research on the island of Lesbos. Around 343 BCE, he was invited by King Philip II of Macedonia to tutor Philip's son, the teenager who would become Alexander the Great. This is one of the most famous teacher-student relationships in history, though its actual influence on Alexander is hard to measure. In 335 BCE, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum. He taught there for twelve years and wrote many of his most important works. After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens made Aristotle's position dangerous. He fled the city, reportedly saying he would not let Athens 'sin twice against philosophy', a reference to the execution of Socrates. He died a year later in 322 BCE, aged 62. His surviving works, which are mostly lecture notes rather than polished books, cover logic, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, poetry, rhetoric, and metaphysics. Together they shaped Western thought for more than two thousand years. Almost every field of inquiry has at some point been measured against Aristotle.