Not a Fan of Plato

Plato is often regarded as one of the originators of western philosophy. This is extremely unfortunate. Plato's fame and influence come from the fact that he was one of the first philosophers and the most prolific writers of ancient times.

Have you ever read his "Republic"? The book is so thoroughly, what we would today refer to as ignorant and bigoted that most of the intelligent people I know keep notebooks refuting certain points that he makes. In fact this seems to be a habit of serious philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Popper to dispute Plato. Mathematics has had to invent "imaginary" and "irrational" numbers to come to terms with the reality that Plato did not wish to acknowledge.

Plato may not have even been an associate of Socrates. In the dialogues written by Plato nowhere will you hear Plato speak or being spoken to. The historical accuracy of the dialogues is also doubtful, reading through them and trying to figure out how old a given person is can lead to endless troubles. It’s as if Plato was simply making things up as he went along. Yet the dialogues were often dictated to him or were pieced together from letters written by the men involved.

Plato was so obsessed with the perfection of the world in which we live, things are either good or bad, black or white, his philosophy has thrown up numerous barriers to progress in the modern world. It would be impossible to erase Plato’s influence from the world; it may have been the rediscovery of his ideas that brought about many of the positive changes of the European renaissance.

It was also Plato’s ideas thought that have made understanding of the quantum world nearly impossible for anyone raised in modern schools where Plato’s ideas of “pure” mathematics have become the standard in public education.

I acknowledge Plato’s influence on the world. But I don’t like it.