Permanent scholarly record

Plato

c. 428/427–348/347 BCE

Plato was a fourth-century BCE Athenian philosopher whose dialogues stage philosophical inquiry as an encounter with questions, objections, and revisions rather than a list of settled doctrines. His Euthyphro supplies the course's classic pressure on divine-command ethics: is an action good because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is good? The question matters because it asks whether authority can make a moral claim true by itself. Plato was also Aristotle's teacher, but the course uses him principally as the author of this problem: students can test whether a command, institutional policy, or AI system has reasons that survive beyond its source's power.