I stumbled across this item yesterday and wanted to comment on it:
Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.
The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea — the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.
“Plato’s books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,” Dr Kennedy, at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences explains.
“In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.
“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.
The article in Science Daily doesn’t go into a great deal more detail than that. The original paper appears to be here. If anyone has access to the journal or can direct me to informed opinion on the article, I’d appreciate it. Here’s a link to more information on Dr. Kennedy’s web site.
Dr. Kennedy’s finding would be fascinating if true but I’m skeptical. First, it seems exceedingly dependent on the integrity of the text, something about which there is some doubt. I’m not sufficiently familiar with the manuscript tradition of, for example, Plato’s Symposium (the work to which he refers on his web site and one of the works mentioned in the paper) but a quick review suggests to me that there’s reason to believe that the text is corrupt. There is no surviving contemporaneous Greek original. To the best of my knowledge the earliest known manuscripts are in Latin and date from nearly 2,000 years after its presumed date of composition. I know of no complete Arabic version.
Second, there is a simpler explanation for the stichometry (measurement of line lengths) that Dr. Kennedy uses as the basis for his paper: it was introduced by scribes and IMO the more regular an ancient text appears to be the more likely that is to be the case.
Third, in his paper Dr. Kennedy refers to works as having been written by Plato that, although they have been attributed to Plato, were probably not written by the author of the Symposium.
Fourth, the division of the text into twelfths done by Dr. Kennedy is not the only possible division—there are several such divisions. Why does he pick the division into twelfths? My suspicion is that he picked it to support his hypothesis of the relationship between Plato’s texts and ancient Greek music, the opposite of the scientific method.
Fifth, if the rules of your code are sufficiently complex, hidden messages can be found in anything. This is analogous to the various bible code notions that have made the rounds over the last couple of thousand years.
I’m skeptical too, but without knowing the history of the text, it sounds like the type of hidden codes that may have been used in the Renaissance by Kabbalah-influenced humanists who rescued a lot of ancient Greek texts after the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
Plus, the second excerpted paragraph oversells.