The Mythopoetics of Space in the Timaeus
The reading of Plato’s Timaeus leaves the contemporary reader with a special kind of disappointment. Despite the fact that we read in its pages some of the most spectacular and perennial myths of the Western world, modern readers feel rather uneasy with Plato’s physiology and psychology, astronomy and medicine, even with the most challenging element of the whole dialogue, its underlying political agenda—which refers to his whole philosophical project, and its powerful indictment by Sir Karl Popper. Yet today the reader of philosophy lives in a completely different perceptual world which views such grand narratives about the natural world with suspicion and dysphoria. The totalisation of experience within a scheme of universal applicability seems rather incongruous with the postmodernist project of fragmentation, the decentred subject, anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. Within such context the accretions on platonic writing resulting from centuries of readings have indeed obscured the relevance of his writing to our present day thinking. Certainly, Plato thought in a completely different way from us—and we need a large degree of analogical imagination in order to establish connections with his era and its semantic horizons. It seems however that we can hypothesise what made Plato construct his grand theory of everything in this dialogue after the rather “de-constructive” questioning
Plato and the Socratic dialogue : the philosophical use of a literary form
1. Sokratikoi logoi: the literary and intellectual background of Plato's work 2. The interpretation of Plato 3. Socrates 4. Plato as a minor Socratic: Ion and Hippias Minor 5. Gorgias: Plato's manifesto for philosophy 6. The priority of definition: from Laches to Meno 7. Charmides and the search for beneficial knowledge 8. Protagoras: virtue as knowledge 9. The object of love 10. The emergence of dialectic 11. The presentation of the Forms 12. Phaedrus and the limits of writing Appendix Bibliography.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":