Plato began the ‘religification’ of socrates work, and while Aristotle corrected it, Plato, Saul, and Augustine created the intellectual dark ages, just as the muslims created the economic and cultural dark ages, just as Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Boaz, Cantor, Freud, the Frankfurt School (Council of Nicea), and the French Postmodernists and Anglo Puritans attempt to bring about a second intellectual dark age.
Thankfully Smith, Hume, Poincare, Maxwell, Darwin, Menger, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, Spencer, Hayek, Nietzsche, and Turing largely saved us from them. But it wasn’t until the 1990’s that we had the technology to refute the pseudosciences of the 19th and 20th century ‘literary philosophers’ (moral fictionalism).
Unfortunately, just as great war that gave us modernity produced the anglo enlightenment, and then the french, german, jewish, russian, and chinese counter-enlightenments, the European Civil War (World War) to prevent German expansion into eastern Europe, plus the mass industrialization of lying via the use of electronic media, allowed the damage done by the Ashkenazi counter-enlightenment (pseudoscience), and the second French counter-enlightenment(postmodernism), to prosper for almost a century – which has nearly destroyed western civilization.
But we have purified the west before, and we can do it again. But the continental intellectuals have never transitioned – they remain provincial people, with literary tastes, seeking as did Kant to create church within the state, to replace the vacuum left behind by abrahamism, like a drug addict always hungering for his lost substitute for endorphins.
But eventually, there are enough of us remaining in empirical civilization and in the end, empiricism will, ,unless overwhelmed by the underclasses.
Plato was a cancer upon man, trying to nothing more than recapture the past glory made possible by the discovery of a silver mine, flooding athens with wealthy, and not athenian character.