Plato
- See also Wikipedia's article about "Plato".
Plato is rare among Columbia's curricular luminaries: along with Augustine, and occasionally Virginia Woolf, his is the only work appearing on the syallbi of both Lit Hum and Contemporary Civilization. It is, also, undoubtedly the most important of those three. Plato's Symposium, ostensibly an account of a wine-soaked bacchanal little different from those that take place nearly every weekend evening in Columbia's dorms, actually sets out the entire concept of the dialectic. His Republic, meanwhile, embraces a political system that will shock those sophomores who believed the United States' democracy sprung directly from the loins (er, brains) of the ancients. It's also one of the few works in all philosophy to embrace all three branches of that discipline - ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.
But, wait - aren't "Plato"'s books all just accounts of what another philosopher, namely Socrates, once said? Well, maybe. But most experts agree that Plato was almost certainly voicing his own views through Socrates as well. Where the line between the two can accurately be drawn, or if it can, no one knows.
