It is incumbent on any serious student of the sages to actually study what system of thought they were part of, I think. But how many scholars are alchemists? It would be difficult to be a paradigm academic person and retain the kind of involvement an alchemist must have. It was even difficult for Socrates and Aristotle in far less socially controlled times. I am regarded by high Rosicrucians I have met as an alchemist. I have demonstrated to them in advance in one case that I am adept! So you can be assured that my point of view is unique in regards to Plato, Socrates and other alchemists or humanists who have blessed the world with their great works and the over-arching Great Work we all must aspire to. That Great Work includes the Great Architect of the Masonic religion and it is akin to Intelligent Design.

So I humbly agree and disagree with Borro who knew the method of Aristotle well enough to see that Aristotle himself said a few years of studying science did not allow one to rise past the method itself and yet Borro did not adequately address the devious affect of Direct Inferential injection of theory upon the observations of reality that a true science must achieve. But Borro was not alone in this, and most of science still fails to integrate and apply their gradualistic or reductivist opinions to a reality that includes ethereal things. In fact many scientists reject the ether exists at all.

In the last decade I have taken it upon myself to create a whole new history of mans cultural development which shows Pythagoras was actually not the first sage or alchemist. That kind of fiction is the work of people who sought to claim all advancement was of their own making as they developed Empires and refined various means of enslaving people. These same Spin-doctors try to say there was no Hermetic School of thought or no alchemy until after the time of Christ.

In 1960 Dr. Neal Ward Gilbert wrote Renaissance Concepts of Method which was reprinted in 1963. He documents the debate that Foreshadowed the great expansion of scientific research in the ensuing years. (1) I side with Peter Ramus who proposed that the Aristotelian science is not different than the Humanist pedagogical efficiency. I know the Humanists include the great sages or alchemists including Aristotle. Unfortunately the academic world hides the book The Secretum Secretorum which was a letter to Alexander explaining alchemy. Thus I will have to get past the Euro-centric propaganda that hides the alchemical root of the teaching of the family of Merovingians including Yeshua again. There is a great deal of circumlocution and vague attempts to distill wisdom in all philosophy and the verbiage or jargon can send a lay person into paroxysms or convulsions of laughter given the oxymoronic nature of defining wisdom. I will endeavor to simplify and make less use of the obfuscating semantical diatribes. But beyond the semantics of academics lies archetypes and codes that must be understood if we are to pierce somewhat the nature of Socrates and Plato or other humanist/alchemist/sages. The Socratian Dialectic or questioning has much to offer society at present, as I see it.

Thus we find that John of Salisbury, Lambert of Auxerre, and Albert the Greatin discussing methodus as they found it in Boethius translation of the Topics or in the standard medieval definition of dialectictended to emphasize the point that method is a short cut to knowledge, or a short art or compendium. As yet, however, no very well-developed doctrine went with this rather vague formulation, which, as we have seen, is somewhat foreign to both Plato and Aristotle, and which yet purported to be a Greek notion. In fact, methodus did not become a common philosophical term until much later, in the Renaissance, when, as Melanchton observed, it was adopted by the dialecticians for the most correct order of explication. (2)

All right, maybe this is truebut we must question the specialized de-construction of the early thinking which was more whole and integrated. The sophists that Socrates railed against can appear in many forms and even Hume and Ayer in a far later time seem quite sophistic despite their attempt to denounce mere sophistry. Things are not always as easy as they might appear, to say the least. Words are part of the way we think it would appear. I think Socrates and Plato were less affected by the meaning attached to words partially because Plato observed that disciplined knowledge or wisdom had diminished in the millennium since the Phoenicians gave them a writing alphabet.

But it is not clear what Hume took their 'sophistry and illusion' to be, precisely speaking. It is not clear, either, to what extent his own philosophical practice and propositions require us to revise and loosen his two criteria for what is not sophistry and illusion.

In speaking of necessarily true propositions, Ayer evidently has in mind much more than the contents of formal logic and pure mathematics. He takes it that all these necessarily true propositions are merely analytic. That is, they are not made true by any necessities in the world, any natural necessities, but just by meanings of words alone and the logical structures into which they enter. (3)