Frank Kogan

Yes I hink I make a much-too-quick claim of continuity re the scions-of-the-powerful in plato's athens on one hand and in the renaissance on the other: actually -- though there was minimal continuity in the sense that books and certain teaching survived across the milllennium-plus, there was a vast social discontinuity (huge empires rose and fall)

rethinking a bit, i would argue that the scions-of-etc in the renaissance era were consciously modelling themselves on their (idealised) athenian predecessors: to re-animate the glory that was greece-and-rome, you educated yourself along the same lines... so elements that were (arguably) accidental in the relationship between plato's thought and the aristocracies that studied became, by conscious renaissance self-selection, non-accidental

relatedly but distinct, there's the whole story of the skewing of platonism towards a christian reading -- in terms of firming up of xtian theological argument, and of the politics of princes, church and state in the medieval era... in lots of ways the renaissance was about shaking this legacy off, but elements remained unshaken off: the role of centres-of-learning in reproducing and affirming the extant political settlement is, notoriously, one that pressures said centres away from Pure Disenterested Research towards the routinisng of positions that the authorities of the day like to here, and will approve rather than attack

in both cases, i think the call on transcendence -- as resistance to the powers-that-be and as acquiescence to the powers-that-be -- gets embedded as a value to take seriously (or perhaps said better: not to devalue trivially...)

the consequence of this is i think a little like the consequence of it being possible to get a doctorate at oxbridge prior to the mid-19th-century only if you were articled (religiously qualified, where religious basically meant anglican...): many scientific fields were greatly expanded by amateurs who were loosely (and sometimes cynically) religiously learned, becaue you needed to be get get the respect and the distributed resources of shared information; hence elements of anglican thinking were embedded within the various disciplines, at an administrative level as much as anything, and (despite proving largely irrelevant contentwise) were often quite hard to dispel, because they were germane to the smooth running of departments and so on