John Burnet (1863–1928) was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews from 1892 until his death. A leading Platonic scholar, he produced the standard Oxford Classical Text of Plato's complete works between 1900 and 1907 — a text so reliable it remained the reference edition for over a century. Burnet was equally distinguished as a historian of philosophy: his Early Greek Philosophy (1892) shaped the field for generations. He combined meticulous manuscript collation with a deep understanding of Greek philosophical thought.

Burnet's Oxford Classical Text of Plato, published in five volumes (1900–1907), established the modern standard for Plato's Greek text. Working from fresh collation of the principal manuscripts — especially the Bodleian Clarke Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39, copied in 895 AD) and the Paris manuscript A — Burnet produced a conservative text that trusted the best manuscript tradition while noting all significant variants in a concise apparatus criticus. The OCT series, formally known as Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, aims to provide authoritative critical texts for scholarly use. Burnet's Plato has been partially superseded for individual dialogues by the Budé editions and by S. R. Slings's OCT of the Republic (2003), but for many dialogues his text remains the standard.