Gorgias, the last dialogue Plato wrote before leaving Athens, features Socrates' views on the sophist-philosopher debate that then raged throughout ancient Athens. In his discussion with Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, Socrates asserts the existence of a transcendental, perfect knowledge and rejects rhetoric as the perversion of dialectic which harms the soul by creating false belief.
Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece. He was also a mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his most-famous student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."