Greece

Plato
FATHER OF IDEALISM (427-347 BC)

Plato was a Greek philosopher from Athens, student of Socrates, and is considered one of the most important philosophers who ever lived. Plato’s Academy was the ultimate ancestor of the modern university, hence the English term “academic”. It served as an influential center of research and learning for 300 years. Plato believed that reality is divided into two parts: the ideal and the phenomena. The ideal is the perfect reality of existence and the phenomena is the physical world that we experience. His writings explored justice, beauty and equality, and also contained discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, and epistemology. One of his famous quotes is that: “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.”