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The Platonic solids have been known since antiquity. It has been suggested that certain carved stone balls created by the late Neolithic people of Scotland represent these shapes; however, these balls have rounded knobs rather than being polyhedral, the numbers of knobs frequently differed from the numbers of vertices of the Platonic solids, there is no ball whose knobs match the 20 vertices ...
The Theory of Forms or Theory of Ideas, [1] [2] [3] also known as Platonic idealism or Platonic realism, is a philosophical theory widely credited to the Classical Greek philosopher Plato. A major concept in metaphysics , the theory suggests that the physical world is not as real or true as Forms.
The fifth element (i.e. Platonic solid) was the dodecahedron, whose faces are not triangular, and which was taken to represent the shape of the Universe as a whole, possibly because of all the elements it most approximates a sphere, which Timaeus has already noted was the shape into which God had formed the Universe.
According to Stephen Skinner, the study of sacred geometry has its roots in the study of nature, and the mathematical principles at work therein. [5] Many forms observed in nature can be related to geometry; for example, the chambered nautilus grows at a constant rate and so its shell forms a logarithmic spiral to accommodate that growth without changing shape.
In the early 20th century, Ernst Haeckel described a number of species of radiolarians, some of whose shells are shaped like various regular polyhedra. [5] Examples include Circoporus octahedrus, Circogonia icosahedra, Lithocubus geometricus and Circorrhegma dodecahedra; the shapes of these creatures are indicated by their names. [5]
In the Timaeus, the category of illusion includes all the "opinions of which the minds of ordinary people are full," while the natural sciences are included in the category of belief. [4] The term eikasía (Ancient Greek: εἰκασία), meaning conjecture in Greek, was used by Plato to refer to a human way of dealing with appearances. [5]
The carved stone balls have been taken as evidence of knowledge of the five Platonic solids a millennium before Plato described them. Indeed, some of them exhibit the symmetries of Platonic solids, but the extent of this and how much it depends on mathematical understanding is disputed, as configurations resembling the solids can naturally ...
The great chain of being (from Latin scala naturae 'ladder of being') is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle (in his Historia Animalium), Plotinus and Proclus. [4] Further developed during the Middle Ages , it reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism .