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| A.N. Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead) was a widely influential twentieth
century philosopher and mathematician. He is responsible for
coining the following celebrated quote about Plato's enduring influence. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]; To put this quote in its wider context:- ...So far as concerns philosophy only a selected group can be explicitly mentioned. There is no point in endeavouring to force the interpretations of divergent philosophers into a vague agreement. What is important is that the scheme of interpretation here adopted can claim for each of its main positions the express authority of one, or the other, of some supreme master of thought - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. But ultimately nothing rests on authority; the final court of appeal is intrinsic reasonableness. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them... In one of his major works Plato asks:-
"...Are all our actions alike performed by the one predominant faculty, or are there three faculties
operating
severally in our different actions? Do we learn with one internal faculty, and become angry with another,
and with a third
feel desire for all the pleasures connected with eating and drinking, and the propagation of the species;
or upon every impulse to
action, do we perform these several actions with the whole soul?" |
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philosophy - footnotes to plato
quote from A.N. Whitehead
