When I entered college, we had a requirement in "the Humanities". (Later on they allowed for alternatives to HUMA 101-102; you could take a religious-studies course as well, so I did that instead of 102.) The Humanities, also known as The Liberal Arts, were - I later found out - the point of a Western education. I was introduced to Plato by way of The Republic; not actually a bad starting-point, especially to political thought, especially especially as pertains to Iran today. But then...
As we were learning about the history of the classical civilisation, we got into the history of Christianity, and - in early days - this involved Gnosticism. Plato, we learnt, had written other books. So had his students. Aristotle was the important one (unfortunately we didn't get to read him) but Plato's followers were the ones who influenced the Gnostics.
And the questions the Platonists were asking were... boring.
Specifically they were asking stuff like "what is matter" and "what is existence" (ontology) and "how do we know" (epistemology). I hadn't bothered asking this stuff. Aristotle touched on it too, being more interested in the world we got. The hardcore Platonists thought they could derive it from mathematical first-principles. All this without a working set-theory...
Take Numenius for instance. Numenius, defining matter, was stuck with Greek element theory. Moderns can work with that but if we do, we have to transpose our own consensus upon this frame: the Standard Model of particle-physics, perhaps. Worse: Numenius, although a reader (and fan) of Torah, didn't see spacetime as something bound into a finite-age Creation. As a result he inherited that ancient Near Eastern theory where some creator assembles matter into order; matter being coeternal. Again, we can work with that, but only if we refuse to define "matter" outside this universe.
I just couldn't help but think that the philosophers didn't know what they were talking about, either.
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