>>26224>Yes, Alfred Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato and Aristotle would be the most influential interpretation of Plato via scholasticism which is more or less a synthesis of the two and is still upheld in Abrahamic circles as a viable system into modern times. So one should definitely read those two authors.First and foremost, Aristotelianism is but a small fraction of scholasticism. There are countless other schools and the Aristotelian one only got prominent in the end, and was never in a position of undisputed hegemony. Secondly, Aristotle in itself is very different from scholasticism, and Plato never ceased to be a direct influence in its own right, save for the long time in which most of his dialogues were lost in western Europe alongside most of the corpus aristotelicum. Even still, some dialogues always stayed in circulation, such as the Timaeus (for obvious reasons), and many of his ideas (or rather, ideas about his ideas), through Augustine, Boetius, Dionysus Aeropagite, and this general neoplatonic mileau of early christian thought. In the 1200s, the corpus aristotelicum was recovered, iirc, by translations from the arabic comissioned in Spain (translations themselves made from syriac, which themselves were made from greek), and Aristotle was back in the scene. All of Plato's dialogues were recovered afterwards, in the 1500s, after the fall of constantinople, when many greek scholars fled to Italy, along the original greek version of aristotle, again, iirc. Here Plato was truly recovered and had an immense influence in renaissance and early modern philosophy. If you read Descartes meditations after you read the Phaedo, you will understand, and this is just one connection.
Either way, I didn't recommend you Plato because he is an influential guy. I didn't even recommend it to you to get ahold of the philosophical canon and get your stuff together historically. In Plato's dialogue you will find a truly godlike philosopher showing how CONCEPTS work, what are their limits, what configurations can they work in, how do they clash, which ones are implied (often surreptitiously, unbeknownst to the user) by using and abusing other ones… By reading Plato you don't become a PLATONIST, you learn how to THINK, provided you approach the text without those plain formulas found i
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