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.
AXIOMATISABILITY OF WEAKLY FLAT, FLAT, AND PROJECTIVE S-ACTS
ABSTRACT This paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions on a monoid S that the class of flat left S-acts be (first order) axiomatisable. It presents also a streamlined version of the result of Stepanova that the class of projective left S-acts is axiomatisable if and only if the strongly flat left S-acts are axiomatisable and S is left perfect.