How much of Socrates as told through Plato was a literary vehicle for Plato and Platos notions, and how much was Socrates himself is a source of endless debate.

To defend Socrates, It is my opinion (and I don;t know enough about the endless literature on the topic to root that opinion in the work of others, no do I care to) that Socrates was more method than than content. I think some of the more spiritual and mildly nonsensical dialogs (The Republic, The Phaedo) are probably more Plato than anything else.

Regardless, Plato and/or Socrates were elitists and spoke against the democracy practiced by the Greeks. That is certainly not part of my admiration for Socrates/Plato.

As for having a mystical bent- hell, so did Descartes, Newton and Galileo. The modern western tradition seems to forget these things. Even the most rational of the 'modern' rationalists had their heads full of bullshit and superstition after having been raised by a superstitious society. It does not lessen the thought of the Pythagorean School, nor its import (and nor socrates/plato), that they had mystical aspects. No more than the thought of Einstein is lessened by the fact he beat his wife, nor any of the great physicists of the 40s who happened to be base Nazis.

As for Socrates having 'attacked the very foundations of what later became Western scientific method', I am not aware of any reading or body of thought on the issue that would support that claim. His attack against sophistry and the sophistical tradition in fact would seem to stand in stark contrast.

The Greeks largely valued the Deductive over the Inductive. In fact, it would not be until the general time of Bacon that Inductive knowledge would even be thought of as having privileges to even sit at the table of discourse, much less as a form of proof of claim. So I would say that trying to draw Socrates/Plato as an attacker of the scientific method would be something Akin to trying to cast Akhenaton as a critic of Christianity. Everything is like everything else in some way shape or form... That some aspects of Socrates/Platos thought are like an antithesis for the scientific method may not be particularly meaningful, and certainly not to the extent that would make your statement follow.

Sagan and other bought this view that there were right thinkers and bad evil mystical wrong thinkers- as like two sides of a coin... going back to the dawn of human thought. It wasn't like that. Its more like feathers on a dinosaur, or the clumsyness of early mammals. You see bits and pieces emerging here and there in thinkers and thoughts still embedded in the mystical or bizarre thought of their time. There are notable exceptions (Hobbes, I think, is one... And depending on the accuracy of the fragments and how they are read, perhaps also heraclitus- or so I like to think).

Yeti

Yeti