Plato as a Natural Scientist

Abstract

Widely differing opinions have been expressed on Plato's place in the history of Greek science, as on many other features of his work. The view that Plato's attitude and influence were nothing short of disastrous for science has been widespread. Platt, for instance, put it that ‘Plato, being first and foremost a metaphysician with a sort of religious system, would not have us study anything but metaphysics and a kind of mystic religion’. Dampier-Whetham believed that ‘Plato was a great philosopher, but in the history of experimental science he must be counted a disaster’. In hisHistory of Ancient GeographyJ. O. Thomson spoke of Plato's ‘positive contempt for observation, upon which natural science rests’, and in his influential book onGreek ScienceFarrington put it that ‘from the scientific point of view theTimaeusis an aberration’.On the other side Plato has found almost as many defenders from among those who were primarily philosophers, or philosophers of science, or even practising physicists, as from among the specialist Greek scholars themselves. In such books asScience and the Modern World(1926) andAdventures of Ideas(1933) Whitehead granted that Plato was responsible for diverting interest from the observation of particular facts in physical science, but suggested that ‘Plato had another message … An intense belief that a knowledge of mathematical relations would prove the key to unlock the mysteries of the relatedness within Nature was ever at the back of Plato's cosmological speculations’. There is a sense, then, in which ‘Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than does Aristotle’. In 1927 Shorey quoted Whitehead and substantially developed this line of interpretation in his paper ‘Platonism and the History of Science’, still probably the most outspoken vindication of Plato's reputation as a scientist.