evidence: A guy I went to school with said to me once that Plato’s writing is like crossover fan fiction. And it’s true. This is a great modern comparison, actually. For anyone that doesn’t know, crossover fan fiction would be like if a crazed fan wrote a short story about Edward and Bella from the Twilight franchise enrolling at Hogwarts and playing Quidditch with Harry Potter. Plato would have different philosophers and different public figures having conversations that they never actually had, sometimes even people that didn’t even live at the same time as each other. [...] Now, it’s important to note, there’s a lot of really smart people that don’t think Plato literally thought that a separate world existed with perfect forms of everything just floating around everywhere. They say he probably was just stating in a melodramatic way that concepts like justice or beauty exist independent of just actions or beautiful things. Human beings commonly mistake just actions and the definition of justice as being the same thing. I mean, he did speak of a different heaven-like world. But really, he may have just been marking a contrast between considering what is a just action here and now and what is the eternal, unchanging definition of justice regardless of time and place.