The seeds of nearly all philosophy are to be discovered in Plato, but we must not pretend that they are more than seeds, which require the closest of scrutiny before even one who knows what they grew into can see the relation between them and it.
(R. M. Hare, "Plato and the Mathematicians," chap. 5 in Essays on Philosophical Method, New Studies in Practical Philosophy, ed. W. D. Hudson [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972], 80-97, at 83 [essay first published in 1965])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 