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's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias
Acknowledgements Introduction: Plato's tales of teleology 1. What is the Timaeus-Critias about? 2. The status of the Atlantis story 3. The status of Timaeus' account 4. Teleology and craftsmanship 5. Necessity and teleology 6. Space and motion 7. Body, soul and tripartition 8. Perception and cosmology 9. Dialogue and dialectic Epilogue Bibliography General index Index locorum.
Concepts of space in Greek thought
This book provides detailed information about the theories of place and space of the ancient atomists, Plato, Aristotle, Peripatetics, Stoics and others, about the historical and philosophical context of these theories and about the nature of the relevant sources.