Any question answered...

Mark, as you know, a lot of bollocks gets published in peer-reviewed journals. :)

Well, obviously I haven't read the article, either, but the BBC article certainly ascribed views to Kennedy about Plato's philosophical views:

Fascinatingly, it's a musical code," he said. "Plato and the Greeks believed music was the key to mathematics and the cosmos.

"What we didn't know was that he used Greek musical scales to give his works a hidden structure and then built layers of hidden meanings beneath that."

The hidden codes reveal that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

I believe that it is nonsensical to attribute any of these views to Plato, although I'm sure Kennedy is putting it rather more carefully.

I'd be very surprised if there was anything much in it. I'd obviously be happy to be persuaded, but unless a senior Platonic scholar comes out supporting this I am going to be extremely reluctant to call it anything but nonsense.

There is a lot to be said about how Plato wrote and people often hope to reduce that complexity. It's not enough that he actually tells you quite a lot about why he writes the way he writes. He even tells you a lot about his method, and yes, he didn't put all of his views perfectly openly, and for very good reasons. There's a huge amount of work on all this.

Unfortunately, I have a rule against having philosophical debates on-line, but I'm most happy to discuss it in person. :)