Customer Reviews

Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved

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The origin of "Western intelligence" is deeply rooted in the joint event of the appearance of BOTH mathematics and philosophy in Ancient Greece. For philosophy as such, as it originated in Greece, is not fully intelligible without a serious knowledge of Greek mathematics and, viceversa.

I myself had reached this conclusion by perceiving the link while studying Euclid. One book that really helped me to understand the philosophical background of Greek mathematics(or viceversa) is Arpad Szabo's "The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics". In this book, one could say, mathematics is stated to have originated with Parmenides and the Eleatics, who, as we know, were crucial for the development of Greek Philosophy. Thus ontological and mathematical problems became embedded "ab origine", as two complementary faces of an indivisible unit. Problem is that in our tradition, philosophy and mathematics are conceived and studied separately. This Book is unique in this respect, AFAIK, in clarifying this relationship by specifically analyzing Plato's Parmenides and Philebus, even through a very careful reading of Aristotle's reference to Plato's philosophy in section 6, book I of the Metaphysics. Professor Sayre's presentation of the structure of Plato's Parmenides is the clearest that I know, and for just this I would give it 5 stars.

So even if the "riddle" is not, and cannot, be fully resolved, this is a work that masterfully helps to put many of the pieces together.