Cherniss studied at Berkeley with Roger Jones. According to Fontenrose, Jones had been a ... graduate student at Chicago and had taken his doctorate under Paul Shorey. He was perhaps Shorey's most able and promising student in Greek philosophy, especially in Platonism. Jones readily adopted Shorey's views of Plato's teachings, stressing the unity of Plato's thought from the Apology and Crito down to the Laws, and opposing the Burnet-Taylor school, which saw a significant change in Plato's thought after the Republic ... Jones passed Shorey's doctrine on to Harold Cherniss, his most brilliant student. Cherniss was thus said to be "the heir and apologist of Shorey's interpretation of the unity of Plato's thought." Cherniss continues to be regarded as an influential advocate of unitarianism: "One of the most important versions of unitarianism is represented by the likes of Paul Shorey, Harold Cherniss, and their disciples." Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (1935) Cherniss's landmark monograph transformed studies of Pre-Socratic philosophy by forcing scholars to re-evaluate their sources and raise the rigor of their arguments. This contributed to a wave of creative revisionism about the origins of European thought. Aristotle's treatises contain more quotations from and reports about Pre-Socratic philosophy than any other early source. After these, historians must rely on commentators and Neo-Platonists who often come half a millennium later. Until Cherniss, therefore, Aristotle was thought our best and most reliable guide to Pre-Socratic philosophy because he was so early. Cherniss demonstrated "in detail how much of the conceptual apparatus often attributed to Presocratic thinkers in fact represents Aristotle's own reformulation of their theories in terms of his own philosophy." This created skepticism about Aristotle's reports and forced later historians to be more selective and to justify their use of them deliberately and rigorously. Writing in the 2008 Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham said that Cherniss … found multiple sources of error in Aristotle's treatments of the Presocratics… Since Cherniss's book was published, scholars have been cautious of Aristotelian interpretations of the Presocratics; they cannot be used as uncritical data for reconstructing Presocratic theory. There have been some attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle… Overall, however, Cherniss showed that modern reconstructions of the Presocratics could improve on and correct ancient ones. "The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas" (1936) This well-known article was first published in The American Journal of Philology and gives a positive overview