UPDATE: Plato's "Hidden Philosophy" of Science Uncovered

July 1, 2010

A pattern of symbols embedded in the writings of Plato is said to reveal a musical structure. According to Jay Kennedy (University of Manchester), the code is Plato's “hidden philosophy," positing that the force of nature is mathematically dictated.

The pattern of symbols is, apparently, based on what Pythagoras had called the “harmony of the spheres."

Kennedy claims that in Plato’s The Republic, groups of words related to music appear after each twelfth of the text, an arrangement representing the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some of these notes are harmonic, others dissonant. The harmonic notes are, according to Kennedy, sounds associated with love or laughter while the dissonant notes are marked with screeching sounds of war or death.

“As we read his books,” Kennedy said in a University of Manchester press release, “our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments.”

Although most scholars have dismissed claims about Plato’s encoded writing, Kennedy said, “This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols.”

For more, see the Math in the News item " A Pythagorean Approach to the Universe" (June 25, 2008).

This story has attracted a lot of media attention and several scholars have weighed in for and against Kennedy's findings.

Reporter Theunis Bates interviewed Dr. James Warren on the subject. Warren, an expert in early Greek philosophy at Cambridge, said, "It's not impossible in principle, but I think I would need further persuasion. The question is, why should it be there? And what difference does it make to our understanding Plato's dialogues?"

Julian Baggini interviewed Professor Andrew Barker for an article in The Guardian. "Barker, a leading authority on ancient Greek music, said that 'the results he's come up with look too neat to be accidental' and that if scholars confirm them, 'he will have shown something quite startling about Plato's methods of composition'."

Toronto Star reporter John Terauds responded to Barker's statement in The Guardian. "What the article fails to mention is that we read ancient texts with a Modern sensibility, which separates science and the arts into two distinct camps. But you can't really appreciate anything that predates Romanticism without looking at both structure and surface as an organic, mutually dependent whole… A Pythagorean-mathematical analysis of Plato's texts won't change the gist or significance of the philosophical musings of Socrates and his groupies. But allowing the arts and sciences to intermingle a bit more in our here-and-now could help bring together a very fractured culture."

"Over the centuries, composers have used many kinds of code for cognoscenti to decipher, for posterity to ponder, or as a secret language for their lovers to treasure," wrote Tom Service, author of The Guardian's On Classical Blog. Service used the story as an opportunity to list several other musical code-makers and breakers, including some of Plato's and Pythagoras's heirs.

Lewis Page writing for The Register is much more critical of Kennedy's findings. "Plato himself may have a warning for Kennedy and his search for mathematical meaning in the texts: A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers," he wrote. "Even so, Kennedy's paper will no doubt give rise to a lot of cheery academic debate, which people will be able to join in without actually having to learn any very hard maths. So it should be very popular."

Source: Geek System (June 28, 2010); University of Manchester (June 28, 2010); The Register (June 29, 2010); The Guardian (June 29, 2010);  The Toronto Star (June 30, 2010); AOL News (June 30, 2010)