The deepest influence
The platform reads Plato as having shaped Western civilization more deeply than any other philosopher — not always directly, often through intermediaries and transformations, but pervasively. The conception of an immaterial reality beyond the senses, of the immortal soul, of the rationally ordered cosmos, of knowledge as the grasp of eternal truths, of education as the soul's ascent — these Platonic ideas became the deep grammar of Western thought, absorbed so thoroughly that they often ceased to look like Plato at all.
Through Platonism and the Church
The platform reads the principal channel of Plato's influence as later Platonism and its fusion with Christianity. The Neoplatonism of Plotinus reworked Plato's Forms and his ascent of the soul into a vast metaphysical system; and through Augustine above all, this Platonized philosophy entered the heart of Christian theology, shaping its conceptions of God, the soul, the afterlife, and the relation of the eternal to the temporal. The platform reads the Christian doctrine of the soul, the contempt of the flesh, the orientation toward an unseen and eternal reality, as in large part Platonic inheritances — Plato's thought carried into the religion that would form Europe.
The medieval cosmos and the Renaissance
The platform reads the Timaeus as the single most influential Platonic text for a thousand years: through it the medieval West inherited the vision of a rationally ordered, purposive cosmos made by a good creator — a vision that underwrote both medieval theology and, the platform argues, the later confidence that nature is intelligible and mathematical which made modern science possible. And it reads the Renaissance recovery of the full Plato — Ficino's translation of the complete dialogues, the Florentine Academy, the revival of "Platonic love" from the Symposium — as one of the defining intellectual events of the age.
Why the platform reads it
The platform reads Plato and civilization as the proof of why Plato is a central pillar of the platform: his influence is not confined to philosophy but runs through religion, science, art and the whole self-understanding of the West. To trace his afterlife is to trace much of the intellectual history of civilization itself — which is why the platform reads him, beside Aristotle, as one of the two minds from which the Western tradition most deeply descends, and central to why Plato still matters.