Whitehead, who was a peculiar mixture of a mathematician and a mystic (perhaps one should call him a Pythagorean), once statetl: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato." No doubt, this was meant as praise, but it really was a condemnation, so far as it was true at ail. What it really says is that European philosophy through ail the centuries was unable to free itself from the strait jacket of Plato's essentialism. Essentialism, with its emphasis on discontinuity, constancy, and typical values ("typology"), dominated the thinking of the western world to a degree that is still not yet fully appreciated by the historians of ideas. Darwin, one of the first thinkers to reject essentialism (at least in part), was not at ail understood by the contemporary philosophers (ail of whom were essentialists), and his concept of evolution through natural selection was therefore found unacceptable. antiphilosophy
The Problem of Teleology From Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics on, a belief was prevalent (opposed by the Epicureans) that there is a purpose, a predetermined end, in nature and its processes. ..To be for or against teleology remained a battle cry throughout the nineteenth century and right up to modern times. Only within the last twenty-five years or so has the solution become evident. It is now clear that seemingly goal-directed pro cesses exist in nature which are not in any way in conflict with a strictly physico-chemical explanation.
Two Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, had a greater 87 influence on the subsequent development of science than any others. Plato (ca. 427-347 B.c.) had a special interest in geometry which powerfully affected his thinking. His observation that a tri angle, no matter what combination of angles it has, is always a triangle, discontinuously different from a quadrangle or any other polygon, became the basis for his essentialism,5 a philosophy quite unsuitable for biology. It took more than two thousand years for biology, under the influence of Darwin, to escape the paralyzing grip of essentialism. Plato's influence was equally unfortunate in matters more strictly biological. With the roots of his thinking in geometry, it is not surprising that he had little use for natural history observations. Indeed, in the Timaeus he expressly states that no true knowledge can be acquired through the observations of the senses, but only a pleasure to the eye. His emphasis on the soul and on the architect (demiurg) of the cosmos permitted, through the neo-Platonists, a connection with Christian dogma which dominated the thinking of western man up to the seven teenth century. Without questioning the importance of Plato for the history of philosophy, I must say that for biology he was a disaster. His inappropriate concepts influenced biology adversely for centuries. The rise of modern biological thought is, in part, the emancipation from Platonic thinking.