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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. IV, Plato: the man and his dialogues, earlier period,
Cambridge University Press, 19896, pp. 8-38.(Ι) LIFE ||| (a) Sources ||| (b) Birth and family connexions ||| (c) Early years ||| (d) Sicily and the Academy ||| (2) PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES \ Greek Fonts \ Plato Home Page
Page 22
The account of the Pythagoreans in the first volume showed how difficult it is to separate their philosophy from Plato’s. The very word philosophic as Plato uses it is a link between them (p. 204) and his interpretation of philosophic understanding in terms of religious purification and salvation (204f.), his passion for mathematics as a glimpse of eternal truth (213), his talk of the kinship of all nature, of reincarnation and immortality and of the body as the temporary tomb or prison of the soul (311), his choice of musical terminology to describe the state of the soul (317 with n.) and especially the mathematico-musical account of the composition of the world-soul which he puts into the mouth οf Timaeus of Locri (214), and finally his adoption of the doctrine of the music of the spheres in the myth of Er - all these are evidence of a close affinity between the two in which Plato must have been a debtor. In fact he turned to the Pythagoreans for help in solving the two most serious problems which faced him in his attempt to set the predominantly moral teaching of Socrates on a secure philosophical base. The search for ethical standards had led Socrates to demand universal definitions; but universal definitions could have no application in a world subject to Heraclitean flux. If Socrates was right, then, there must exist unchanging realities outside the world of ordinary sensible experience. The two questions which this raised were, first, was there any evidence for the existence of such changeless truths? Second, if they did exist, how could we ever have any trustworthy knowledge of their nature? Now is it possible for the mind to reach beyond the confines of experience and bridge the gap between the world of change and the changeless, eternal Forms? The answer to the first question lay for Plato in the realm of mathematical truth which had been so largely revealed by the Pythagoreans and, through the discovery of its application to music, was regarded by them as the prime cause of order and harmonia in the universe. In mathematics, therefore, as then understood, Plato had an example before his eyes of the existence of truth outside the empirical world. The statement that a triangle consists of three straight lines is true, yet it is not true of any triangle drawn by man, for a line has by definition length but no breadth and is therefore invisible. The triangles of experience only approximate to the truth, as a just action on earth approximates to the eternal Form of justice. The modern explanation of mathematical truth as analytic or tautologous was not a possible one for Plato or any thinker of his time.
A Day in Old Athens * A Short History of Greek Philosophy
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-plato.asp?pg=22
