Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When did Plato start the Academy?
What was later to be known as Plato's school probably originated around the time Plato inherited the property at the age of thirty, with informal gatherings which included Theaetetus of Sunium, Archytas of Tarentum, Leodamas of Thasos, and Neoclides. According to Debra Nails, Speusippus "joined the group in about 390 BC". She claims, "It is not until Eudoxus of Cnidos arrives in the mid-380s BC that Eudemus recognizes a formal Academy." There is no historical record of the exact time the school was officially founded, but modern scholars generally agree that the time was the mid-380s, probably sometime after 387 BC, when Plato is thought to have returned from his first visit to Italy and Sicily. Originally, the meetings were held on Plato's property as often as they were at the nearby Academy gymnasium; this remained so throughout the fourth century.
When a military junta ('the Colonels') took power in 1967, he was one of the many intellectuals arrested, sacked from their posts then confined to restricted residence. He then started what he called an informal new 'Plato's Academy' - his old students would gather at his house in Athens and his teaching continued there.
Socrates, believed to have been born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in ancient Greek philosophy. Athens was a center of learning, with sophists and philosophers traveling from across Greece to teach rhetoric, astronomy, cosmology, geometry, and the like. The great statesman Pericles was closely associated with this new learning and a friend of Anaxagoras, however, and his political opponents struck at him by taking advantage of a conservative reaction against the philosophers; it became a crime to investigate the things above the heavens or below the earth, subjects considered impious. Anaxagoras is said to have been charged and to have fled into exile when Socrates was about twenty years of age. There is a story that Protagoras, too, was forced to flee and that the Athenians burned his books. Socrates, however, is the only subject recorded as charged under this law, convicted, and sentenced to death in 399 BCE (see Trial of Socrates). In the version of his defense speech presented by Plato, he claims that it is the envy he arouses on account of his being a philosopher that will convict him.
The Republic (, Politeia; Latin: Res Publica) is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC, concerning justice (), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.
Many think that "Clitophon" is a fragment or draft written by Plato. Grube believes "Clitophon" to have been a draft of Plato as a reflection of his dissatisfaction with his earlier methods, a tone seen in the middle period of Plato's works, but was abandoned as is attested to in its lack of revision. Bury believed that, if indeed it was written by Plato, "Clitophon" would be a fragmentary preface of "Republic", a stance held by Shorey and Grote. However, Slings makes note that no ancient author ever indicated that "Clitophon" was incomplete or unfinished. In "Parallel Lives", Plutarch, fully aware of "Clitophon", mentions that Plato's life ended before finishing his work (32.2), namely "Critias", not "Clitophon"; this indicates that "Clitophon" was finished in the opinion of ancient authors.
According to Plato's "Apology", Socrates's life as the "gadfly" of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone were wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded that no-one was wiser. Socrates believed the Oracle's response was not correct, because he believed he possessed no wisdom whatsoever. He proceeded to test the riddle by approaching men considered wise by the people of Athens—statesmen, poets, and artisans—in order to refute the Oracle's pronouncement. Questioning them, however, Socrates concluded: while each man thought he knew a great deal and was wise, in fact they knew very little and were not wise at all. Socrates realized the Oracle was correct; while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all, which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance. Socrates's paradoxical wisdom made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial, when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life instead, to finance the time he spent as Athens's benefactor.
The decades that followed became known as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, during which time Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations for Western civilization. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during this time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Guided by Pericles, who promoted the arts and fostered democracy, Athens embarked on an ambitious building program that saw the construction of the Acropolis of Athens (including the Parthenon), as well as empire-building via the Delian League. Originally intended as an association of Greek city-states to continue the fight against the Persians, the league soon turned into a vehicle for Athens's own imperial ambitions. The resulting tensions brought about the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which Athens was defeated by its rival Sparta.
Before the first attempt at democratic government, Athens was ruled by a series of archons or chief magistrates, and the Areopagus, made up of ex-archons. The members of these institutions were generally aristocrats who ruled the polis for their own advantage. In 621 BC, Draco codified a set of notoriously harsh laws designed to reinforce aristocratic power over the populace. Still, a growing problem of aristocratic families feuding among themselves to obtain as much power as possible led to a point where most Athenians were subject to harsh treatment and enslavement by the rich and powerful. In the 6th century BC, the Athenian laboring class convinced Plato's ancestor Solon, premier archon at the time, to liberate them and halt the feuding of the aristocracy. What soon followed was a system of chattel slavery involving foreign slaves. Solon then issued reforms that defined citizenship in a way that gave each free resident of Attica a political function: Athenian citizens had the right to participate in assembly meetings. By granting the formerly aristocratic role to every free citizen of Athens who owned property, Solon reshaped the social framework of the city-state. Under these reforms, a council of 400 members (with 100 citizens from each of Athens's four tribes) called the "boule" ran daily affairs and set the political agenda. The Areopagus, which formerly took on this role, remained but subsequently carried on the role of "guardianship of the laws". Another major contribution to democracy was Solon's setting up of an "Ecclesia" or Assembly, which was open to all male citizens. 
Not long afterwards, the nascent democracy was overthrown by the tyrant Peisistratos, but was reinstated after the expulsion of his son, Hippias, in 510. Cleisthenes issued reforms in 508 and 507 BC that undermined the domination of the aristocratic families and connected every Athenian to the city's rule. Cleisthenes formally identified free inhabitants of Attica as citizens of Athens, which gave them power and a role in a sense of civic solidarity. He did this by making the traditional tribes politically irrelevant and instituting ten new tribes, each made up of about three "treaties", each consisting of several "demes". Every male citizen over 18 had to be registered in his deme.
In the mid-5th century BC, when the Athenian Acropolis became the seat of the Delian League and Athens was the greatest cultural centre of its time, Pericles initiated an ambitious building project that lasted the entire second half of the century. The most important buildings visible on the Acropolis today — the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the temple of Athena Nike — were erected during this period. The Parthenon was built under the general supervision of the artist Phidias, who also had charge of the sculptural decoration. The architects Ictinos and Callicrates began their work in 447 BC, and the building was substantially completed by 432, but work on the decorations continued until at least 431.
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw () is a public university of visual arts and applied arts located in the Polish capital. The Academy traces its history back to the Department of Arts founded at the Warsaw University in 1812. As a separate institution it was founded in 1844 during the Partitions of Poland. In an upgrade in 1904 it was named the Warsaw School of Fine Arts; and in 1932 it received recognition as an Academy. At first the institute did not have its own building and classes were held in several locations around the city. Following an architectural competition a design by Alfons Gravier was chosen and construction began in 1911. The building was completed by the outbreak of the First World War.
Hypatia (born 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. She is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She is known to have written a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume "Arithmetica", which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's "Almagest", based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the "Almagest".
The first recorded school of anatomy was in Alexandria from about 300 to the 2nd century BC. Ptolemy I Soter was the first to allow for medical officials to cut open and examine dead bodies for the purposes of learning how human bodies operated. On some occasions King Ptolemy even took part in these dissections. Most of the early dissections were done on executed criminals. The first use of human cadavers for anatomical research occurred later in the 4th century BCE when Herophilos and Erasistratus gained permission to perform live dissections, or vivisection, on condemned criminals in Alexandria under the auspices of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Herophilos in particular developed a body of anatomical knowledge much more informed by the actual structure of the human body than previous works had been. Herophilos was the first physician to dissect human bodies and is considered to be the founder of Anatomy. He reversed the longstanding notion made by Aristotle that the heart was the "seat of intelligence". He argued instead that this seat was the brain. He established the brain as the center of intelligence, distinguished between veins and arteries, and made many other accurate observations about the structure of the human body, especially the nervous system. However, Herophilos was eventually accused by his contemporaries of dissecting live criminals. The number of victims is said to be around 600 prisoners.
It is argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. In Plato's dialogue the "Republic", Socrates openly objected to the democracy that ran Athens during his adult life. It was not only Athenian democracy: Socrates found short of ideal any government that did not conform to his presentation of a perfect regime led by philosophers, and Athenian government was far from that. It is, however, possible that the Socrates of Plato's "Republic" is colored by Plato's own views. During the last years of Socrates's life, Athens was in continual flux due to political upheaval. Democracy was at last overthrown by a junta known as the Thirty Tyrants, led by Plato's relative, Critias, who had once been a student and friend of Socrates. The Tyrants ruled for about a year before the Athenian democracy was reinstated, at which point it declared an amnesty for all recent events.
In Plato's Gorgias (and in the Protagoras 345c4-e6), Socrates argues that no one does wrong willingly, one of the most famous doctrines to be associated with him. When framed in modern (Western) terms, the implication is that it is ignorance, rather that free individual agency, that is responsible for morally wrong actions.
Trinity Academy was founded in September 1995 by a board of directors. In 1998, Trinity Academy of Raleigh was formed when Trinity Academy (a high school) and Regent School of Raleigh (K-8) merged. Originally, the two divisions were on different campuses: (Asbury United Methodist Church and Calvary Presbyterian Church). In 2002, the entire school moved to Providence Baptist Church, and then again in 2005 to 10224 Baileywick Road campus where the school resides today.
In September 1699, the Reichstag decided to introduce an "improved calendar" to the Protestant German states without having to take on the Gregorian Calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The 'improved calendar' was introduced the following year and resulted in 18 February 1700 being followed by 1 March. A patent for the calendar was granted to the planned Berlin Observatory by Prince-elector Frederick III on 10 May 1700 and eight days later Gottfried Kirch was appointed to Director of the Observatory. On 11 July (his 43rd birthday) the Kurfürst signed a document formally founding an Academy and an Observatory in Berlin. Therefore, Berlin received an academy just like those already existing in London, Paris and Rome - the Prussian Academy of Sciences (originally German name: ″Kurfürstlich-Brandenburgische Societät der Wissenschaften″), based on the plans of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz became the first president of the Academy. The fees resulting from the calendar patent were the almost single financial basis of the institution for a long period. The society originally had no actual observatory of its own and Kirch carried out his observations at various private observatories including, from 1705, the private observatory of Geheimrat Bernhard Friedrich von Krosigk on the Wallstrasse, in Cölln. Kirch was assisted by his wife Maria Margarethe and his son Christfried. Maria Margarethe discovered, among other things, the comet of 1702. In the meantime the Kurfürst had been raised in 1701 to the rank of King in Prussia. On 1 January 1710, the capital was expanded by uniting the previously independent towns of Dorotheenstadt, Friedrichstadt, Friedrichwerder, and Cölln and Berlin (the oldest ones).
Athens, after a tyranny in the second half of the 6th century, established ancient Europe's first democracy as a radical solution to prevent the aristocracy from regaining power. A citizens' assembly (the Ecclesia), for the discussion of city policy, had existed since the reforms of Draco; all citizens were permitted to attend after the reforms of Solon, but the poorest citizens could not address the assembly or run for office. With the establishment of the democracy, the assembly became the de jure mechanism of government; all citizens had equal privileges in the assembly. However, non-citizens, foreigners living in Athens, slaves and women had no political rights at all. After the rise of the democracy in Athens, other city-states founded democracies. However, many retained more traditional forms of government. As so often in other matters, Sparta was a notable exception to the rest of Greece, ruled through the whole period by not one, but two hereditary monarchs. This was a form of diarchy.
The role of dialectic in Plato's thought is contested but there are two main interpretations: a type of reasoning and a method of intuition. Simon Blackburn adopts the first, saying that Plato's dialectic is "the process of eliciting the truth by means of questions aimed at opening out what is already implicitly known, or at exposing the contradictions and muddles of an opponent's position." A similar interpretation has been put forth by Louis Hartz, who suggests that elements of the dialectic are borrowed from Hegel. According to this view, opposing arguments improve upon each other, and prevailing opinion is shaped by the synthesis of many conflicting ideas over time. Each new idea exposes a flaw in the accepted model, and the epistemological substance of the debate continually approaches the truth. Hartz's is a teleological interpretation at the core, in which philosophers will ultimately exhaust the available body of knowledge and thus reach "the end of history." Karl Popper, on the other hand, claims that dialectic is the art of intuition for "visualising the divine originals, the Forms or Ideas, of unveiling the Great Mystery behind the common man's everyday world of appearances."
Some modern scholarship holds that, with so much of his own thought obscured and possibly altered by Plato, it is impossible to gain a clear picture of Socrates amid all the contradictory evidence. That both Cynicism and Stoicism, which carried heavy influence from Socratic thought, were unlike or even contrary to Platonism further illustrates this. The ambiguity and lack of reliability serves as the modern basis of criticism—that it is nearly impossible to know the real Socrates. Some controversy also exists about Socrates's attitude towards homosexuality and as to whether or not he believed in the Olympian gods, was monotheistic, or held some other religious viewpoint. However, it is still commonly taught and held with little exception that Socrates is the progenitor of subsequent Western philosophy, to the point that philosophers before him are referred to as pre-Socratic.
Because Foerster was not a member of the Academy, the Observatory was separated from the Academy in 1889 and affiliated to the Berlin University. The original Academy Observatory had already been used by the University since the founding of Berlin University in 1809. In 1890 Friedrich Simon Archenhold became a worker at the Observatory and erected on the instructions of Foerster a photographic outpost on the Halensee in Grunewald for the photographing of nebulae.
The Ptolemaic dynasty (; , "Ptolemaioi"), sometimes also known as the Lagids () or Lagidae (; , "Lagidai", after Lagus, Ptolemy I's father), was a Macedonian Greek royal family, which ruled the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. Their rule lasted for 275 years, from 305 to 30 BC. They were the last dynasty of ancient Egypt.
The Neoplatonic Florentine Academy was founded after Gemistus Pletho reintroduced Plato's thoughts to Western Europe during the 1438–39 Council of Florence. It was sponsored by Cosimo de' Medici, led by Marsilio Ficino and supported by Medici until death of Lorenzo Medici. It was never a formal group but the members considered themselves a modern form of Plato's Academy. Important members were Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Pico della Mirandola, and Gentile de' Becchi. The academy would proceed to translate into Latin all of Plato's works, the Enneads of Plotinus, and various other Neoplatonic works.
In ancient Greece, after the establishment of the original Academy, Plato's colleagues and pupils developed spin-offs of his method. Arcesilaus, a Greek student of Plato established the Middle Academy. Carneades, another student, established the New Academy. In 335 BC, Aristotle refined the method with his own theories and established the Lyceum in another gymnasium.
An argument that has been used against ascribing ironic intent to Plato is that Plato's Academy produced a number of tyrants who seized political power and abandoned philosophy for ruling a city. Despite being well-versed in Greek and having direct contact with Plato himself, some of Plato's former students like Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea; Chaeron, tyrant of Pellene; Erastus and Coriscus, tyrants of Skepsis; Hermias of Atarneus and Assos; and Calippus, tyrant of Syracuse ruled people and did not impose anything like a philosopher-kingship. However, it can be argued whether these men became "tyrants" through studying in the Academy. Plato's school had an elite student body, some of whom would by birth, and family expectation, end up in the seats of power. Additionally, it is important to remember that it is by no means obvious that these men were tyrants in the modern, totalitarian sense of the concept. Finally, since very little is actually known about what was taught at Plato's Academy, there is no small controversy over whether it was even in the business of teaching politics at all.
Despite the Platonic Academy being destroyed in the first century BC, the philosophers continued to teach Platonism in Athens during the Roman era, but it was not until the early 5th century (c. 410) that a revived academy (which had no connection with the original Academy) was established by some leading Neoplatonists. The origins of Neoplatonist teaching in Athens are uncertain, but when Proclus arrived in Athens in the early 430s, he found Plutarch of Athens and his colleague Syrianus teaching in an Academy there. The Neoplatonists in Athens called themselves "successors" ("diadochoi", but of Plato) and presented themselves as an uninterrupted tradition reaching back to Plato, but there cannot have actually been any geographical, institutional, economic or personal continuity with the original academy. The school seems to have been a private foundation, conducted in a large house which Proclus eventually inherited from Plutarch and Syrianus. The heads of the Neoplatonic Academy were Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, Proclus, Marinus, Isidore, and finally Damascius. The Neoplatonic Academy reached its apex under Proclus (died 485).