ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) once famously remarked that the European philosophical tradition consists “of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Along with his pupil Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) provided the foundation for one of the most pervasive themes within Western science, the notion that all creation may be conceived as a vast, graduated chain of beings, stretching, in the words of a later poet, “from nothing to the Deity.” Called by various other names, such as the scale of nature (scala naturae), or the ladder of beings, the Great Chain of Being was the subject of a classic monograph of that title by the American historian of ideas Arthur O.Lovejoy (1873-1963).
