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.
Two Conceptions of Vacuum
Writers on ancient philosophy have always been impressed by the early atomists' conceptual breakthrough in introducing vacuum, or void, as an intelligible notion. But discussion of the concept itself has been rare and, on the whole, disappointing. It is as if the doctrine were so obviously correct and sensible that no one had paused to ask whether it really is quite so straightforward. My contention is that it raises considerable conceptual difficulties of its own, and that these gradually emerged, and were tackled, over a long period. I shall be concerned primarily with the theoretical aspects of void, and not with its cosmological role or with the empirical arguments for and against its existence. Void, To x?v6v, is literally 'the empty'. Does that mean empty space? So it is regularly assumed. In the index to Cyril Bailey's The Greek A tomists and Epicurus, for example, the entry under 'void' simply reads 'see space'. But there is, as a matter of Greek usage, at least one other thing that Tor xevov could mean, and that is 'emptiness'. Viewed as emptiness, void would not be a kind of space or place. Rather, a portion of void would be the emptiness in such and such a place. And as an occupier of place, it might even be considered capable of locomotion. There should be nothing intuitively abhorrent about the idea of something with a purely negative characterisation occupying places and moving a gap in the traffic, for example. When you carry your thermos flask to work, you would do well to think of the vacuum in it as moving from place to place with it. If you insist instead that the vacuum in it is empty space and therefore incapable of moving in space, you may have to conclude that throughout your journey the vacuum in your flask is being replaced in a constant stream. These considerations are not meant to tell decisively in favour of the space-occupier interpretation of void, but to show that that interpretation is not too implausible to be entertained. Whether or not a particular thinker actually adopts it, consciously or unconsciously, will depend partly on other features of his system. For example, if he considers void an element, capable of being part of a compound body and of moving around with it, he is more likely to think of it as a negative substance occupying