previous next
[510c] said I,” for you will better understand after this preamble. For I think you are aware that students of geometry and reckoning and such subjects first postulate the odd and the even and the various figures and three kinds of angles and other things akin to these in each branch of science, regard them as known, and, treating them as absolute assumptions, do not deign to render any further account of them1 to themselves or others, taking it for granted that they are obvious to everybody. They take their start

1 Aristot.top. 100 b 2-3οὐ δεῖ γὰρ ἐν ταῖς ἐπιστημονικαῖς ἀρχαῖς ἐπιζητεῖσθαι τὸ διὰ τί, exactly expresses Plato's thought and the truth, though Aristotle may have meant it mainly for the principle of non-contradiction and other first principles of logic. Cf. the mediaeval “contra principium negantem non est disputandum.” A teacher of geometry will refuse to discuss the psychology of the idea of space, a teacher of chemistry will not permit the class to ask whether matter is “real.”

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (James Adam)
load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: