"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)In chapter six, Aristotle discusses and his teacher, Plato, perhaps the only philosopher who is more famous than he. Plato extended the basic ideas of Pythagoras beyond physics, engineering and art by positing Forms or Ideas as a "Substance" more real than matter or visible beings.Mathematicians, poets, saints, and dictators have all found Plato to be their teacher, and so any interpretation of him will be relevant, never more so than one by his greatest student, Aristotle.