Plato

Plato was a superb writer, and his works are part of the world's great literature. His extant work is in the form of dialogues and letters. Some of the dialogues and many of the letters accredited to him are known to be fraudulent, while others are doubtful. In the various dialogues he touched upon almost every problem that has occupied subsequent philosophers. The dialogues are divided into three groups according to the probable order of …

…the pilgrimage of the philosopher through death to the world of eternal truth. Many of the late dialogues are devoted to technical philosophic issues. The most important of these are the Theaetetus; the Parmenides, which deals with the relation between the one and the many; and the Sophist, which discusses the nature of nonbeing. Plato's longest work, the Laws, written during his middle and late periods, discusses in practical terms the nature of the state.