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News

News: August/September 2010

’Plato’s musical code’ claim • Blue skies grow cloudy • Forced ops dilemma • Philosopher and wit Anthony Quinton dies — News reports by Sue Roberts

Plato’s Hidden Musical Code?

Newspapers in July reported that an American philosopher based at Manchester University had made a startling claim about Plato’s dialogues. In a paper in the journal Apeiron, Dr Jay Kennedy, a specialist in the history and philosophy of science, argues that the dialogues contain a regular mathematical structure which relates them to an ancient 12-note musical scale. Kennedy points to the numbers of lines in the dialogues (for instance, the Apology has 12x100 lines, the Republic has 12x1,000 lines). He claims that each dialogue divides into twelve parts, and that at the start of each part Plato has inserted a passage corresponding to that note in the scale. In ancient Greek musical theory, some notes in the scale were harmonious, and others dissonant or neutral.

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