Synopsis Western philosophy is asserted in the famous remark of Alfred North Whitehead: "The safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." He was also the prototypical political philosopher whose ideas had a profound impact on subsequent political theory. His greatest impact was Aristotle, but he influenced western political thought in many ways. The academy, the school he founded in 385 B.C.E., became the model for other schools of higher learning and later for European Universities. Its final closure in C.E. 529, became the most famous teaching institution of the Hellenistic world. Mathematics, rhetoric, astronomy, dialectics, and other subjects.