Need help choosing Greek/Roman authors

[Mudhammam]

Yes and no. Dawkins is right to blame him because he set in motion most of thought that divides humans to this day. But when you combine this with the God Delusion, and meme theory it amounts to our evolutionary flawed perceptions as a species.

It isn't that Plato was all bad, but what everyone took off with was the worst idea he came up with. It would be the same type of blame if everyone went after Newton's alchemy and not his physics.

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And again for the reasons I stated. Plato's idea of questioning was not an act of testing and falsification. He had no clue back then how important control groups and peer review were. So his idea of questioning ended up leading people to fish for excuses not insure quality of data. It was a flawed idea, even though the intent was there.

Unlike the Presocratics, Plato (and the Socrates he relates) are more concerned with the art of philosophical inquiry, how we know what we know or don't know, what it means for something to be or not to be. While it's true that Plato and the Greeks had nothing like the scientific method, their ideas have required relatively little change to remain relevant and still be part of intense debate, which is one that I think may be more metaphysical than scientific, and in an epistemological or linguistic sense, I think Plato's ideal forms remain an important contribution (remember he was essentially responding to the atomists and those who pretty much said nothing is true or false or even intelligible because the world of percepts is always changing i.e. can't step into the same river twice, whereas concepts are to some extent static).