What did Whitehead mean when he said ';All of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato';?

Subcommands is right--and wrong.





';It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy鈥檚 basic questions鈥攁nd doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man鈥檚 long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.';


Review of J.H. Randall鈥檚 Aristotle,


The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963, 18.





What Whitehead meant is that even Aristotle's precise refutations of Plato's answers were answers to Plato's questions.





But since ';the record of their duel is the record of man鈥檚 long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness,'; Whitehouse should have said philosophy is a footnote to the 360 degree radical difference between the man who gave us the Dark Ages and the man who gave us the Renaissance.What did Whitehead mean when he said ';All of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato';?
He meant that Western philosophy is essentially either continuing the Platonic tradition or fighting against its legacy. Nietzsche, for example, was desperately trying to shed the ethical and metaphysical assertions made by Plato, while thinkers like Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas were trying to preserve it (albeit in modified forms).What did Whitehead mean when he said ';All of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato';?
It means that Whitehead did not know better than Plato. It means that he never read other philosophers than Western philosophy. And for him, all philosophers are the offspring of Plato, which is very narrow-minded. Yet at his time, it was true.
Quite simply put, everything is merely an addition to something that Plato has already explained, mentioned or suggested.
He was misquoted, he said play-do.


It means you form your own philosophy as you go. JK