Plato is the first scientist whose work we still possess. He is our first writer to interpret the natural world mathematically, and also the first theorist of mathematics in the natural sciences. As no one else before or after, he set out why we should suppose a link between nature and mathematics, a link that has never been stronger than it is today. Mathematical Plato examines how Plato organized and justified the principles, terms, and methods of our mathematical, natural science.

"Roger Sworder deserves our gratitude for drawing attention to the significance of mathematics in Plato's thought and writings. He lays the principal discussions out before us with clarity. He also presents Plato as a theorist of nature: of physics and not just metaphysics, to use Aristotle's distinction. Not all readers, we should admit, will be equally convinced of the usefulness of Plato's science for today, but they will all be led more deeply into Plato's vision of reality."--ANDREW DAVISON, Westcott House, Cambridge

"Here is Plato for an anti-Platonic age. The author gives careful attention to some of the most important passages in the Platonic dialogues and offers new solutions to some of Plato's most famous mathematical puzzles. He then considers the implications of these penetrating studies for the philosophy of science, and the natural sciences especially. This is a book that revivifies the core themes of Platonism and restores science to worship. It shows Roger Sworder to be one of the foremost students of Plato writing today, and places him in the noble tradition of Thomas Taylor."--RODNEY BLACKHIRST, author of Primordial Alchemy and Modern Religion: Essays on Traditional Cosmology

How far has the Western intellect come since Homer and the earliest Greek philosophers? Nearly three millennia have passed and in our own eyes we have made enormous progress since those times, especially in the last five centuries. But this, of course, depends on our peculiar way of reading Homer and the first philosophers.We take it for granted that their knowledge of natural science was rudimentary, that it hardly qualified as science.But this book argues that Homer and Parmenides were accomplished astronomers, geographers, physiologists and psychologists. The book bases its argument on the detail of their works and on the testimony of ancient commentators. In the modern context this is a quite new way of reading Homer and Parmenides, but it is also a very old one. Over the last millennium the West has moved from a religion without a natural science to a natural science without a religion.The culture in our era which best united the sciences of nature with the spirit was the ancient Greek.This book considers two of its institutions, the Homeric Odyssey and the Delphic Oracle.

Of all the crafts and professions other than the priesthood, none has been more closely connected with the religious taditions of Western peoples than mining and metallurgy. Not so long ago our ancestors would have found it incredible that people could not see the connections between mining, metallurgy, and the sacred, just as we now find it incredible that they could. What was a commonplace to the European mind for millennia has for us become a matter of the deepest obscurity. This is a matter of more than historical interest. It goes to the heart of how we think about work, about religion, and about the relations between people and nature. For our ancestors most forms of work were spiritual paths, disciplines that shaped those who engaged in them as powerfully as the ritual of church or temple. In many crafts and professions the stages by which the learner was inducted were initiations into substantial undestandings of the spirit and of spiritual practice. The early chapters of this book consider how the smith god of the Greeks and Romans made the world in his forge, how Moses made the tabernacle as God commanded, and how mining was sanctified in the Middle Ages. Traditionally, these forms of work were thought to repeat and extend the creative powers of God and nature, and those who engaged in them enjoying a special insight into the processes of the divine creaion. The withdrawal of the sacred sense from human work has diminished religion in many Western societies, and the several stages by which this withdrawal occurred is one of the major concerns of this book. This same withdrawal has also diminished our sense of the relations between the human and natural worlds. In earlier times people felt that working with the natural world helped it to bring to birth the many goods with which it was in labor. Work fulfilled not only the worker but nature itself. Even in quite recent times the spirits of the earth, the fairies and dwarfts, actively assisted farmers and miners in their work according to common belief, and the fifth chapter considers some of the stories about these elemental denizens of the mine. The final chapter examines how the belief in such creatures came to be lost and the consequences of that loss for our understanding of the natural world. This book is a book of stories from many different places and times in the history of the West, and the juxtaposition of these stories in a coherent sequence reveals a way of looking at work, nature, and religon that was much more substantial than is our own.