Is Plato the Father of Modern Philosophy? Why Descartes Gets That Title

Plato is not usually called the “father of modern philosophy”. That title is normally given to the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), whose Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) are the standard starting point for histories of modern philosophy. Plato lived about two thousand years earlier, in fourth-century BC Athens. The label people more often attach to him is a founder of Western philosophy, or the first philosopher whose work survives in bulk. The reasons for that, and the real connections between Plato and the modern period, are set out below.

Who is the “father of modern philosophy”?

In textbooks, “modern philosophy” begins in the seventeenth century, and Descartes is given the title because he set out to rebuild knowledge from a secure starting point, the certainty of one’s own thinking (“I think, therefore I am”), instead of relying on inherited authority. Others who share the label or are named alongside him include Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke. Which of them counts as the father of the period is a convention among historians, not a fact that can be proved. What is not disputed is that Plato does not hold the title.

In what sense is Plato a “founder”?

Several descriptions of Plato are common, and they should be kept apart.

• Earliest large surviving body of work. Most earlier Greek thinkers, such as Thales and the other Presocratics, survive only in fragments and in reports by later writers. Aristotle names Thales as the first to inquire into first principles (Metaphysics 983b), but Thales wrote nothing that has come down to us. Plato’s dialogues survive essentially complete, which is why he often serves as the earliest full voice in the history of philosophy. See what makes Plato influential.
• A founder of institutions. His school, the Academy, ran for centuries and trained Aristotle, among others.
• A shaper of the agenda. Plato’s questions, such as what justice is, what knowledge is, whether there are objective standards of the good, and how mind relates to the world, are still the standard topics of the subject.

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead made the best-known claim of this kind, writing in 1929 that the European philosophical tradition could be described as “a series of footnotes to Plato”. Whitehead was speaking in a deliberately sweeping way, and he meant the wealth of general ideas in Plato’s writings, not that every later philosopher agreed with him. It is a sweeping epigram rather than a detailed historical claim.

How is Plato connected to modern philosophy?

Plato is not the father of the modern period, but modern philosophers read him, borrowed from him and argued with him.

• Rediscovery in the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato’s works, printed in 1484, made the dialogues available to Western readers in a form they had not had in the Middle Ages, when only a few were known in Latin. This fed the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance and the Florentine Platonic circle.
• The Cambridge Platonists. In seventeenth-century England, thinkers such as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth built a rationalist, spiritual philosophy on Platonic foundations, in reaction to the materialism of Hobbes.
• Rationalism and innate ideas. Descartes held that the mind has ideas not derived from the senses, which has been compared with Plato’s claim that learning is recollection (Meno 81a-86c). Scholars debate how far the resemblance goes, because Descartes’ route is through the thinking self, while Plato’s is through the Forms. Our page on why Plato would disagree with Descartes’ method of doubt explores the contrast.
• Kant and the Ideas. In the Critique of Pure Reason (A312-320/B368-377), Kant discusses Plato’s use of “Ideas” and says that Plato saw something important in the way reason reaches beyond experience, while using the term in his own way.
• The empiricist alternative. Locke, Berkeley and Hume represent a tradition that starts from experience, in contrast to Plato’s emphasis on a realm of Forms grasped by reason. See Plato’s influence on modern thinkers.

What did Plato’s philosophy actually say?

In brief: the dialogues, which usually feature Socrates, explore what virtue is, what knowledge is, and how a good life and a good city should be organised. In the Republic Plato argues that the physical world is a changing image of unchanging Forms, and that the highest kind of knowledge is understanding of them (the divided line, 509d-511e). He also proposes an ideal city ruled by philosophers. See why the Republic is a key work and the Socratic method in the dialogues.

Is the title “father of modern philosophy” a good fit for Plato?

It is not, for three reasons.

1. Date and method. Modern philosophy as a period concept is tied to the seventeenth century’s break with scholastic authority and its new interest in method and in the new natural science. Plato belongs to a very different setting.
2. Plato does not model the modern method. He does not argue from a single indubitable starting point, and he is not an empiricist. His dialogues work by testing definitions through conversation.
3. Aristotle’s role. For many centuries the dominant ancient authority in Western universities was Aristotle, Plato’s own pupil, and modern philosophy defines itself largely against the Aristotelian scholasticism of the late Middle Ages. See Aristotle’s critique of Plato.

Quick answer

• The standard “father of modern philosophy” is Descartes.
• Plato is better described as a founder of Western philosophy, the first thinker whose work survives at scale, with an influence that runs through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern philosophy.
• Whitehead’s “footnotes to Plato” is a famous generalisation, not a literal claim.