Science Historian Deciphers Plato's Code

Reader eldavojohn tips the news of a researcher in the UK, Jay Kennedy, who has uncovered a hidden code in the writings of Plato. From the University of Manchester press release: "[Dr. Kennedy said] 'I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato. This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.' ... The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea — the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. ... Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure — it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher [Socrates] had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death." Here is the paper (PDF), which was published in the journal Apeiron: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science.

Comments

Socrates, not Aristotle

[jjohnson]

Aristotle was a student of Plato, and lived a long life that didn't end in execution. Socrates was the teacher of Plato who drank Hemlock after being sentenced to death the by the Athenians.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Furthermore, as if it weren't wrong enough already, Socrates was not executed for heresy but for corruption of youth.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even worse, the circumstances of his death weren't just for corruption of youth, but also for his lack of remorse for his "crimes". In Athenian law, the condemned is permitted to suggest an alternative sentence - exile, imprisonment, a fine - Socrates suggested he pay about the equivalent of $5. The tribunal then voted on whether or not to sentence the condemned to death or this other sentence. He was sentenced to death by a larger margin than he was convicted :).

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[cheesybagel]

You are probably joking, but some of his pupils were some particularly nasty, infamous bloodthirsty tyrants. When Athenian democracy was restored people associated with the tyrants were purged, as per custom.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Capsaicin]

Socrates never existed at all. He was a fictional character used as a tool to propose ideas.

Plato is not the sole reference to Socrates. Xenophon, who would have been around 30 at the putative time of Socrates' death similarly "preserved" Socratic ideas in a series of dialogues.

Plato's works are all Plato's ideas.

It's true that we can't safely distinguish the two. However the ideas, and indeed the character of Socrates portrayed in Plato's Apology, differs markedly from those in later works such as The Republic. It seems that Plato began by trying to keep alive the memory of his mentor, but ended by using him as a mere vehicle for his own ideas.

Re:Socrates, not Aristotle

[Anonymous Coward]

Plato is not the sole reference to Socrates. Xenophon, who would have been around 30 at the putative time of Socrates' death similarly "preserved" Socratic ideas in a series of dialogues.

Not to mention Aristophanes; and also sources that are relatively later but derive from independent material, like the Aristophanes scholia, Aristoxenus, Pausanias, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Porphyry, ...

Riiiiight

[Darkness404]

Right, and Dan Brown is always right in his books.

According to Wikipedia

The oldest surviving manuscript for about half of Plato's dialogues is the Clarke Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39), which was written in Constantinople in 895 and acquired by the Oxford University in 1809

So lets see here, our oldest manuscript is over a thousand years old and we still think that we can accurately "decode" his code? Because everything was faithfully reproduced? Lets see here, some books of the Old Testament of the Bible were written in later than 500 BC and the dead sea scrolls date from around 150 BC - 70 AD depending on who you ask, making the Dead Sea Scrolls a more faithful reproduction more likely than our copies of Plato's writings.

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how I know you didn't read the paper?

First off, because the author (Kennedy) doesn't ever talk about decoding anything.

The author uses previous research into Platonic line length to arrive at 35 characters per line on average, and then he uses this line length as a metric into which to divide up the dialogues. So far he's very safe.

He finds that numbers of lines in dialogues suddenly become very, very round and that the works can be broken apart easily, usually into twelfths. That's his first conclusion. The only major problem here is that he doesn't show his data but keeps pointing to "works in progress," which undermines his credibility somewhat, but not fatally. If what he publishes later bears all this out, he's golden.

Later on, he uses spurious works attributed falsely to Plato as a control group to see whether or not the roundness of lines and the twelve-fold structure is valid, and he finds that the control group, in which he didn't expect to find the same characteristics as the experimental, indeed does not conform to the same principles. So far, so good.

Kennedy looks at the twelve part structure and determines that ideas or shifts of tone seem to follow a progression strongly correlated to what we understand of ancient musical theory, which makes a lot of sense given that Plato knew some of this (Plato mentions Damon of Athens, a math/music theorist, repeatedly). Basically, he's connected a lot of dots that classicists already had in front of them but hadn't assembled yet.

I have no clue where the fuck the Slashdot summary came from, but it's horribly, horribly wrong both in terms of summarizing the research and in terms of general history (Aristotle as Plato's teacher?).

As for the age of the manuscripts—the whole point of the exercise is to work on larger chunks of ideas, not on individual characters like in those BS "Bible Code" shenanigans. While the exact character for character accuracy of ancient texts is a problem at times and for some texts (we call that textual criticism), it's not such a big deal for Plato, and it's definitely trivial when working at the scale of ideas and moods rather than individual characters.

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

The author uses previous research into Platonic line length to arrive at 35 characters per line on average, and then he uses this line length as a metric into which to divide up the dialogues. So far he's very safe.

He finds that numbers of lines in dialogues suddenly become very, very round and that the works can be broken apart easily, usually into twelfths. That's his first conclusion. The only major problem here is that he doesn't show his data but keeps pointing to "works in progress," which undermines his credibility somewhat, but not fatally.

I have just now attempted to check the accuracy of the article's counts. They're not staggeringly good.

I have taken the TLG text of the Symposium, stripped everything but letters of the Greek alphabet, divided it into 35-character chunks (not finished yet, since I'm having to do it manually; Unicode Greek causes serious hiccups in automated search-and-replaces done with regular expressions).

Kennedy claims that in the Symposium "Pausanias’ speech is aligned with the point two-twelfths of the way through the dialogue," which according to Kennedy is 2400 lines long. Based on that, Pausanias' speech should start very close to line 400. In fact it starts at line 377, an error of -23 lines. Not miles off, but hardly exact enough to be very striking. Eryximachos' speech is supposed to start at the three-twelfths point, i.e. line 600; in fact it starts at line 619, i.e. an error of +19 lines.

If we're allowed to have errors ranging from -23 to +19 in 200-line chunks, there's really no argument to be based on precision. Colour me unimpressed.

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Addendum: I've now divided the Symposium into 35-character lines. This dialogue, which Kennedy talks about on pages 7-8, 10-11, 14-15, and 17-18, works out as follows. I offer no interpretation of the differences between Kennedy's claims and the actual figures, except to acknowledge a very approximate correlation.

Total length of dialogue

• Kennedy's claim (p. 10): 2400 lines.
• Actual: 2375 lines plus 2 characters (error: -25 lines).

Pausanias' speech

• Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 400, lasts 200 lines.
• Actual: begins at 377 (-23), ends at 599, i.e. lasts 222 lines (+22).

Eryximachos' speech

• Kennedy's claim (p. 7): begins at line 600, lasts 200 lines ("including the repartee over Aristophanes' hiccups": cherry-picking?).
• Actual: speech extends 619-758 (139 lines); repartee extends 599-778, i.e. 179 lines (-21).

Aristophanes' speech

• Kennedy's claim (pp. 7-8): begins at line 800.
• Actual: begins at 778 (-22).

Agathon's speech

• Kennedy's claim (p. 8): ends at line 1200.
• Actual: ends at 1180 (-20).

Socrates' speech

• Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 600 lines "including his conversations with Agathon and Diotima".
• Actual: extends lines 1180-1833, i.e. 653 lines (+53).

Alcibiades' speech

• Kennedy's claim (p. 8): lasts 400 lines.
• Actual: extends lines 1955-2302, i.e. 347 lines (-53).

Re:Riiiiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Addendum to the addendum: those interested in verifying my results may find it useful to have the Symposium chunked into 35-character lines. plain text; ODT version; PDF version.

Aristotle? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kdawson, your are an idiot. You're dumber than a pack of matches. I've had cats smarter than you. My cats have had hairballs that are smarter than you.

Even Bill and Ted knew the difference between Aristotle and Socrates. You're dumber than Bill and Ted.

Seriously. Re-evaluate your life, dude. You're doing the wrong thing.

Philosophy graduates/phds in the house?

[ThorGod]

How reputable a journal is Apeiron?

Re:Philosophy graduates/phds in the house?

[John Whitley]

Watch your step there, friend! There are apparently two journals with that name, quite different from one another.

The traditional academic journal, apparently out of UT Austin's philosophy department: Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science

Then the online journal: Apeiron, Studies in Infinite Nature.

This paper was published in the UT academic journal, not the (somewhat questionable looking) online journal.

Beyond that, I have no experience with the UT publication or its track record.

Actually, heresy is a better description

[brokeninside]

What he was actually accused of most frequently gets translated into English as 'impiety.' There were multiple counts of impiety according to Plato's retelling. Some of these were inclusive of corruption of the youth but others involved introducing "strange new doctrines."

Re:Good article

[Randle_Revar]

>It seems little has changed in the day to day affairs of man.

Not only has it not changed much in 2,400 years, if you read about ancient Mesopotamia, you will find that not much has changed in 5,000 years

Depends on which Apeiron

[brokeninside]

If it's the one put out by the school of philosophy at UT Austin, it's very reputable. If it's the forum for 'dissident' researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system, not so much.

That said, his thesis doesn't sound all that far fetched to me. A large number of interpreters of Plato through the ages have argued for a "hidden" doctrine. And Plato's emphasis on mathematics is unquestioned. He would not accept anyone into his school that did not already have a good grasp of mathematics. The real question is whether Kennedy is just picking up noise or has found a legitimate code.

I'm a bit doubtful mostly because we know next to nothing about what ancient Greek music. There are various reconstructions, but it's all highly speculative.

Re:Cretin != Cretan

[beanyk]

Your link is to a subscription service. More accessible (though not as impressive) is the dictionary.com definition:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cretin