Plato

"Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato-at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato, the Philosopher
Both Plato, the Philosopher and Plato: New Readings (1850) by Ralph Waldo Emerson were originally published as one of a series about leaders who most influenced his work and whose biographies eventually became the content of a collection entitled Representative Men (also available from Cosimo Classics). Like Plato, Emerson believed in the importance of intellectual thinking over material reality, and he voiced this principle as he began to write about the basic concepts of the philosophy of Transcendentalism.