To this day, Plato's 'Timaeus' grounds the form of ethical and political thinking called 'Natural Law' - the view that there are norms in nature that provide the patterns for our actions and ground ...the objectivity of human values. This book presents a scholarship on Plato's 'Timeaus' by some of the greatest minds alive today.
I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at
86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and ...commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the body’s influences. In the second section, I argue that every psychic disorder is a disruption of the motions of the inner psychic circles by the body; moreover, I defend my translation of 86b. In the final section, I argue that the goal of education is to restore the circles to their original orbits, and I disarm a possible objection that bad education is also a cause of psychic disorder.
The aim of this paper is to examine the implications of Plato’s use of the term stoicheion, since his awareness of stoicheion’s polysemy reveals his view of the origin, the complexity and, at the ...same time, the order of reality. Moreover, his use of stoicheion allowed him both to inherit and to detach himself from his predecessors. I begin by presenting the history of the notion of stoicheion; then, since one of the meanings of stoicheion is ‘letter of the alphabet’, I focus on the Cratylus, which contains the first of several passages where Plato employs the alphabet as a paradigm for the structure of a complex system. Finally, I turn to the Theaetetus, where Plato, for the first time, uses stoicheion in the sense of ‘element’ and where, through the relation letters/syllables, Plato clarifies that enumeration and juxtaposition are not sufficient to attain the real knowledge. I will argue that only thanks to these steps can we understand the occurrences of stoicheion in the Timaeus, where Plato first states that air, earth, fire and water are not stoicheia tou pantos, and then reveals that, instead, the basic triangles are ‘the elements of the universe’.
This essay explores the way in which early Christian writers held an eschatological understanding of what it is to be human, something that is to be attained, through the transformation of death and ...resurrection, and something that requires our assent. In this context, the article offers a new reading of the late fourth‐century work entitled On the Human Image of God (otherwise known in English as On the Making of Man) by Gregory of Nyssa. It argues that Gregory structured his text in parallel to the three parts of Timaeus’ speech in Plato's dialogue. The resulting picture sees creation as a dynamic ascent from the lower forms of life to the higher, a growth which is recapitulated in the life‐span of each human being, and also the growth of the human race into the totality of human beings that together constitute the human being in the image of God, the body of Christ.
Numenio appartiene all’ambito degli interpreti medioplatonici dei dialoghi di Platone; nel Medioplatonismo, infatti, si diffuse la tendenza a interpretare la filosofia di Platone come in chiave ...sistematica. Il dialogo più rilevante per questa operazione esegetica nel Medioplatonismo fu certamente il Timeo. In questo contributo intendo concentrarmi sull’interpretazione delle pagine 28a-29a del Timeo da parte di Numenio di Apamea ed esaminarne l’esegesi alla luce della sua prospettiva onto-teologica. Nel Timeo, l’utilizzo del verbo βλέπω ha la funzione di descrivere il fatto che il demiurgo è contemplativo nei confronti del paradigma intelligibile. In Numenio, invece, l’associazione del verbo βλέπω al demiurgo è volta a mostrare il ruolo di mediatore che il secondo dio svolge tra il primo principio e la materia. In questo modo si mostrerà come i passi del Timeo vengano interpretati da Numenio alla luce della sua metafisica dualista.
The aim of this paper is to show that a new approach to Middle Platonist technical exegesis is both necessary and profitable, for it can shed light on the deep philosophical and methodological ...background of Middle Platonist exegesis as a whole. Through the exegesis of Plato’s
, the Middle Platonists wanted to establish specific ways of both demonstrating and conceiving Plato’s authority also in the field of harmonics. In particular, I shall take into account Platonists such as Plutarch, Theon, Nicomachus, and Severus, in order to show that: a) the Middle Platonist exegesis of Plato’s
is chiefly based on a literalist approach to Plato’s text, which is exploited in such a way as to make good technical sense of Plato’s
; b) in this way, Middle Platonists sought to establish Plato’s authority in the field of harmonics; c) this conception of authority is however controversial, for some Platonists (e.g., Theon) regarded him as the founder of very specific technical notions, while others (such as Plutarch, Nicomachus, and Severus) considered him the first to have established the general framework of Greek harmonics.
In The Textual Tradition of Plato's Timaeus and Critias, Gijsbert Jonkers presents a new examination of the medieval manuscripts of both Platonic dialogues, an overview of the ancient tradition and a ...vast collection of ancient testimonia.
In this paper I first address what I consider a central issue in the account of perception in Plato’s
, namely, how the
pass through the body to reach the soul, and thus become
. My point in
is that ...in tackling this issue Plato aims to provide a firm physiological basis to the notion of perception that starts to emerge in the
and the
and is crucial to the late development of his theory of cognition. In the ensuing section I try to put the account of perception in the
into a historical perspective, aiming to highlight two points: a) Plato’s description of the way in which sensible impressions “travel” inside the body and interact with its parts and other constituents is largely indebted to previous theories, such as those we find, for example, in Empedocles and a few Hippocratic writers; b) The leading role in this story (where internal air plays a significant supporting role) is played by blood flowing through the vascular system and thus performing a crucial cognitive function. Moreover, emphasizing the role of blood as well as analyzing the elaborate way in which perceptions are transmitted through the body to the soul proves vital to appreciate (in
) the cognitive status of the lower parts of the soul (which are more involved in perception) and their relation to reason. Overall, the paper adds further elements to our understanding of Plato’s embodied approach to cognition.
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