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Permalink Reply by Kookaburra Jack on August 10, 2010 at 1:12am

For those interested here is conclusion from the above cited article:


Conclusion


There are now several kinds of evidence that Plato’s dialogues have a
sticho metric structure: the lengths of speeches, the alignment of some
speeches and key concepts with the twelfths, the parallel passages,
and the parallel negative and positive ranges. The musical interpretation
of these features is natural and coherent: a twelve-note scale with
harmonic and dissonant ranges underlies the surface narrative of the
dialogues. The evidence and its interpretation fit the historical context:
stichometry was a common prac tice and applied to Plato’s dialogues,
allegory was widely debated, the new mathematics was promoted by
Plato and the Academy, the numeric repre sentation of musical scales
and harmonic theory were well-known, Plato’s correspondents, colleagues,
and followers associated him with Pythagore anism, and the
Neo-Pythagoreans made the scale of twelve, regularly spaced notes part
of their studies of the metaphysics allegedly hidden in the dia logues.
Methodologically, the inductive arguments for these claims have
been se cured by presenting extensive, mutually reinforcing lines of
evidence. There were two kinds of controls or checks. The absence of
stichometric struc ture in Platonic dialogues which are by general consent
spurious shows that the techniques employed here rigourously
distinguish structured from simi lar but unstructured texts. The specific
measurements of relative location were confirmed to within a half a
percent by the passages alluding to the Golden Mean, which generally
validates the algorithms and programs em ployed.
Claims like these raise more questions than can be addressed within
the confines of an essay. Though the evidence reported here will need to
be verified and debated, it does clarify, in a surprising way, Aristotle’s
once puzzling view that Plato was a Pythagorean.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Fulton on August 11, 2010 at 10:02am

Don't buy it. We have no original copies of his work, just copies made much later after he'd passed on. Seems sort of like the Bible code.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on August 28, 2010 at 12:32pm

I too am very skeptical about the claim made in the article. But maybe it's prejudice, because it looks like similar claims - e.g. the Bible code, as Michael has said - that were sensationalist and unfounded.

And, The Gods on Mount Olympus don't rule the world. Science does. But Plato couldn't say that in ancient Greece without a good chance of being put to death.? I'm surprised about this. I thought that this type of repression was a feature of Europe until the past couple of centuries, not of ancient Greece.

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