Plato

English uses a single word, “love,” for erotic desire, affection between friends, family tenderness, religious devotion, and benevolence toward strangers. Ancient Greek had several terms, and Western philosophy inherited three of them as central categories: eros (the desire that reaches for what it lacks), philia (friendship, reciprocal affection), and agape (disinterested love, made central by Christianity). C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves (1960), added storgē, family affection, but the triad eros–philia–agape remains the classical axis of the discussion. This article traces the philosophical history of these ideas: it begins with Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, passes through Aristotle and the Christian tradition, and arrives at Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and twentieth-century and current philosophy. The concepts can be consulted in the glossary: Eros, Philia, and Agape. ...

The Republic (Greek Politeia, Latin Res publica) is the longest and most influential work of Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BCE) and, by broad consensus, one of the founding texts of Western political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of education. Probably composed around 375 BCE, in what is conventionally called Plato’s middle period, it is presented as a dialogue narrated by Socrates in the first person, recounting a conversation held at the house of Cephalus in the Piraeus. The question that drives the book can be put simply: what is justice, and why is it better to live justly than unjustly? To answer it, Plato builds in words an ideal city and, in parallel, a theory of the soul, a theory of knowledge, and a theory of education. ...