New Research on Plato and Pythagoras | Hacker News Reader

New Research on Plato and Pythagoras

personalpages.manchester.ac.uk

32 pointspygy_12 comments

Ironically, one example of the dangers of bright people staying in the academy for too long (on twelve different levels). Which is not to knock academia. Or Plato. Or this paper, exactly.

But I feel kind of sorry for this guy. Throughout my undergraduate years, I was very into this kind of thing. Because of the Indiana Jones aspect, as someone mentioned.

Unfortunately, it's so easy to misinterpret patterns. There are many more dialogues -- which I assume don't fit the model of 35 characters a page or whatever he's going for. And there are many dialogues where these supposed synchronous 'concepts' aren't apparent.

Some day if scholarship got a lot more scientific, there'd be control groups and actual statistical verification.

In the meantime, cognitive dissonance is hard once you go down the numeracy rabbit hole. Aristotle thought Plato was somewhat Pythagorean because...Plato went and stayed with a bunch of Pythagoreans in Syracuse for a while.

If anything, 'stichometry' is much more something a monk would do (in the manner of the Divine Comedy, etc., at the least it seems more Hellenistic and less Classical). And maybe we do get some of the dialogues abridged and ordered to meet the pages that they copied. Also, 'one or two percent accuracy' (top of page 10) when you're counting lines doesn't sound that convincing.

But maybe I'm wrong. It'd be much more convincing if the text could be presented visually and the structure clearly was broken up that way.... And you could show, for instance, that when you break things up with 34 characters or 33 characters, you get no interesting patterns. But when you align things perfectly, a preponderance of patterns suddenly emerges. I don't get the sense that there is a 'preponderence' or whatever. But maybe.

The "visual introduction"[1] presents some IMO compelling evidence.

I'm well aware of our strong confirmation bias and the tendency of our brains to detect patterns where none are to be found, but some other examples are striking, like the definition of the golden ratio place at 61.7% of a dialog, for example, and other patterns in the structure of he dialogs at 1/4 of the notes interval (with some nice meta patterns where discussion about music/ harmonics occurs on key intervals).

The author also states that stichometry is mentioned either in a dialogue or in a text written by a disciple of Plato ( I don't remember, and I'm typing this on my phone which makes cross checking a bit of a chore).

Suspicion is legitimate, since this field is dominated by cranks. The auhtor is well aware of this fact, btw, which in my eyes makes him brave because of he discredit this kind of research can lead to in accademic circles.

[1] http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/Kenn...

Very true. I admire his bravery a lot. And I did relook again at that "visual introduction", thanks. If we could see an actual mini version of the lines of the text for the texs in questions, zoomed out and color coordinated, that might help too.

But you're right, that bit about the golden ratio is pretty convincing. However, is it a reach to think that the 'philosophical mean' in the Apology at around the same spot is on purpose? I don't know.

Stichometry seems much more poetic. Plato just didn't ever quite strike me as the poetic type. But maybe...

I think it's more about steganography than about poetry.

The presence of mathematical patterns is very plausible, and their Puthagorean origin is probable (the musical scale he allegedly used is of Pythagorean origin, and he has been hanging out with some of them.

Puthagoreans were to my knowledge the first initiatic society in occident. They were very secretive and relied on oral transmission for most of their teachings. Rational numbers and the law of harmony had a metaphysical/mystic meaning to them. IIRC, the poor dude who first proved that sqrt(2) is irrational was thrown at sea with a boulder tied to its ankles.

Regarding the presence of the "mean" word at ~61.8% of multiple texts, if the same word is used at that very spot and only there in several texts it has probably been placed there intentionaly, possibly to tie its meaning to Pythagorean symbolism/mysticism.

He might also have been enjoying the activity of concealing math references for its own sake. Being highly intellectual, he might actually have been of the geeky type :-). Since the Greeks didn't have any jargon for discussing about math, they just overloaded other common words to communicate mathematical ideas; it would be Quite amusing to discover that he sprikled its work with math puns :-).

This is of course highly speculative, but it's so fun to play this kind of detective games.

What strikes me at first glance is that he seems to believe that whatever manuscripts we have somehow respect Plato's text formatting. All of these manuscripts are between 500 and 1800 years younger than Plato (I suppose that the picture shows either the Parisii or Vaticani papyrus). Didn't this guy read all the wonderful commentaries philologists write in the introduction of modern editions? The treasures of patience needed sometimes to even make sense of the manuscript?

It has nothing to do with the layout, the "stiches" are groups of about 36 letters or 16 syllables. The author acknowledges the possibility of errors in transcriptions.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1469965

Yours has a more direct link to the full article, though.

Sorry, I missed it.

Most people here should actually skip the general public explaination and read the part written for scholars, which is more straightforward.

I haven't read the essay in PDF format, but I expect it to be quite an insightful read.

Edit: the server ate my upvote. :-/

This is pretty stunning actually. Wondering, if this is borne out, how it gets handled in the Loebs.

Just wow. Great post. How did you come across it?

Slashdot

</shame>

;-)

This reads like an Indiana Jones script. I can just picture a professor frantically waving his hands in the air and yelling, "if Plato's music fall into the hands of the Nazis, it could spell the end for Western Civilization as we know it!!"

You basically described the plot of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the adventure game released in the early 90's.

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