Hi All

Plato has often been maligned because of his apparent fundamentalisms but a closer read shows he had quite a lot of material conducive to Science, much more so than his pseudo-scientist student Aristotle. Plato apparently understood erosion processes and used rational explanations for a lot of phenomena. I think he was groping towards the modern scientific use of mathematics in understanding Nature, moving away from the mystical awe of Maths that Pythagoras encouraged [and some still promote...]

Plato, if you read a number of his mythic images carefully, wasn't a geocentrist - unlike Aristotle - as he apparently believed the Earth was rotating and orbitted the Sun, as is clear in his tale of Ur. Sure he had a lot of kooky ideas but then so did all his contemporaries, even the extreme materialists.

Plato did get out of the Cave - that was the whole point of that metaphor - and saw the invariants of Nature rather than the shifting sands of phenomena.

Adam

PS
Aristotle did occasionally do some good as an empiricist, but he was too much of a noble to sully his hands with decent experiment.