Plato, a student of Socrates, founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BCE — often called the first true university of the Western world. His central idea was the theory of Forms: that the everyday world of the senses is only an imperfect shadow of a higher realm of perfect, eternal ideals. Platonism shaped nearly all of Western philosophy, and was revived centuries later as Neoplatonism by Plotinus, and again by the thinkers of the Renaissance.