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.
First words: a valedictory lecture
Mr Vice-Chancellor, May I thank you for coming to preside at this occasion, and thank everyone else for coming to be presided over – most especially my colleagues in the Faculty of Classics. You were not all here when I joined the Faculty eighteen years ago, but you have all helped to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation, good will, and intellectual adventure, which has made this Faculty such a wonderful place to work and teach in. There is much that I shall miss when I go. But that is not what I want to talk about now. To borrow the words of our Chairman, Ian DuQuesnay, I should like this occasion to be a party rather than a wake. What I want to say is this. It is too late now – twelve years too late – to apologize for not having given an Inaugural Lecture. There was no particular moment when I decided not to, just many many moments when other work seemed both more urgent and, to be honest, more interesting. The trouble with Inaugural Lectures is that you are expected to define your subject and say how it ought to be done. You begin by paying respectful tribute to your predecessor – in my case G. E. L. Owen, so the tribute would have been sincere and a pleasure to compose. But then comes the hard part, in which you set out ‘the aims and objectives’ (as the managerial language of our present rulers would have us call them) of your discipline. In other words, I would have had to tell myself and my colleagues where ancient philosophy in Cambridge ought to go and how it ought to get there.