Koestler says a bunch of contradictory things about Plato. He recognizes that there are a bunch of different time periods to explain, so he seems to recognize that his explanations don’t fit together.
One place he says that it’s not Plato’s fault, but the fault of the Neoplatonists. Maybe that could explain the decline after Ptolemy and the lack of interest of the Byzantines in science, but in the quote above he’s talking about decline before Ptolemy, so Plato proper. He specifically notes a gap between Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so he is talking about a fast fall, not decay past Ptolemy.
He recognizes that the Western Dark Age didn’t have Plato or Aristotle. He specifically mentions that the West got Aristotle before Plato. In between it got Archimedes and science exploded. Aristotle is generally seen as promoting medieval science (Roger Bacon was a fan), but at the very least he didn’t interfere with reading Archimedes. There was a decline of science and civilization generally when Petrarch translated Plato, but I think that’s a coincidence, really the fault of the Black Death.
Koestler says a bunch of contradictory things about Plato. He recognizes that there are a bunch of different time periods to explain, so he seems to recognize that his explanations don’t fit together.
One place he says that it’s not Plato’s fault, but the fault of the Neoplatonists. Maybe that could explain the decline after Ptolemy and the lack of interest of the Byzantines in science, but in the quote above he’s talking about decline before Ptolemy, so Plato proper. He specifically notes a gap between Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so he is talking about a fast fall, not decay past Ptolemy.
He recognizes that the Western Dark Age didn’t have Plato or Aristotle. He specifically mentions that the West got Aristotle before Plato. In between it got Archimedes and science exploded. Aristotle is generally seen as promoting medieval science (Roger Bacon was a fan), but at the very least he didn’t interfere with reading Archimedes. There was a decline of science and civilization generally when Petrarch translated Plato, but I think that’s a coincidence, really the fault of the Black Death.