ABSTRACT
The beginnings of music theory are to be found deep in western mythology, where an antithesis was established between order and disorder. The intelligible, determinate and mensurable domain of Apollo’s order, then, was opposed to the fantastic, vague and shapeless domain of Dionysus’ disorder. For Plato, divine truth was none other than the ordering principle of all reality. Plato recognised that art is capable of revealing the intelligible and universal in the beauty of its structure, that is, through art’s ‘harmony’ and ‘rhythm’. Plato’s two kinds of movement, inspiration and aspiration, are connected with two kinds of prophecy: the prophecy of the mystic, for whom intuition is decisive, and the prophecy of the augur, who has learned the art of interpreting signs of the intelligible and universal. Of course, Popper is concerned almost exclusively with the logic of discovery.
