The ancient Pythagorean cult believed that mathematics and numerology were the keys to understanding the cosmos. A new study claims that Plato embedded secret messages with numbers in his works.
Plato is one of the most famous and influential philosophers of Western culture. IFLScience lived in Athens in the 4th century BC and founded the Academy, which became the Western world’s first institution of higher education.
Focus.Technologies own telegraph channel. Subscribe so you don’t miss the latest and exciting news from the world of science!
Plato’s works, such as The Republic and the Phaedo, are still studied today, more than two thousand years later. They are considered among the most important and influential philosophical texts of all time.
But according to Jay Kennedy, a science historian at the University of Manchester, Plato’s writings contain hidden messages that have been ignored for centuries. In 2010, Kennedy published a theory that he claimed had cracked ciphers and revealed Plato’s secret philosophy.
Kennedy’s theory suggests that Plato was a secret Pythagorean who used his writings to convey secret messages about perverse music theory.
The Pythagoreans are a cult founded by Pythagoras who believed that mathematics and numerology were the keys to understanding the cosmos. According to Kennedy, Plato also shared this belief and wrote his writings reflecting this philosophy.
Kennedy, for example, discovered in The Republic that Plato placed sets of musical words after every twelfth section of the text, which he claimed was associated with the “twelve notes of the Greek musical scale.”
He said that by dividing the texts in this way, important concepts and narrative twists can be found everywhere, positive concepts can be found in congruent places and negative concepts in discordant places.
According to Kennedy, Plato’s readers and students must have noticed the regularity of this pattern. However, some researchers viewed Kennedy’s theory with much skepticism. They argued that the Pythagorean influence in Plato’s writings was already well known, and Kennedy’s specific claims regarding the use of the number 12 were unfounded.
Music theorists John S. McKay and Alexander Reading agreed that numbers played an important role in Plato’s philosophy, but denied Kennedy’s claim that 12 was the key. They argued that the Pythagorean tradition considered the number 10 the most important number and Kennedy’s use of the number 12 was merely arbitrary.
Despite the controversy surrounding Kennedy’s theory, it opened up new avenues for the study and interpretation of Plato’s writings. The researcher’s work showed that much still can be discovered and uncovered in the work of one of the greatest thinkers in Western history.
Previously Focus He wrote that researchers and artificial intelligence have cracked the ancient code and deciphered Mesopotamian cuneiform texts.
We also talked about what other miracles besides the Code of Hammurabi, the wheel and the clock, gave us the cradle of civilization.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.