God and Forms in Plato

D. Mohr Richard

Description

This book is a collection of dovetailing essays which together interpret and assess the chief arguments and texts which make up Plato's cosmology. Arguments in the Timaeus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws X are analyzed with an eye to problems which affect the wider understanding of Plato's metaphysics, theology, epistemology, psychology, and physics. New interpretations are given to Plato's views on the role and characteristics of his craftsman God, the nature and status of Forms, the nature of time and eternity, the status and nature of space and the phenomenal realm, and the nature of and relations between reason, souls, bodies, and motion.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Parmenides Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781930972483
• Langue: English

Extrait

G OD F ORMS in P LATO
G OD F ORMS in P LATO

Richard D. Mohr
2005 Parmenides Publishing All rights reserved Originally published as The Platonic Cosmology in 1985 by E. J. Brill, Leiden This revised and expanded edition, with a new preface, four additional essays, a new extension, and updated bibliography, index locorum and author index published in 2005 by Parmenides Publishing in the United States of America ISBN-13: 978-1-930972-01-8 ISBN-10: 1-930972-01-6 Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mohr, Richard D. God forms in Plato: the Platonic cosmology / by Richard D. Mohr.-Rev. and expanded ed. p. cm. Rev. ed. of: The Platonic cosmology. 1985. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-1-930972-01-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-930972-01-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Plato. 2. Cosmology, Ancient. I. Title: God and forms in Plato. II. Mohr, Richard D. Platonic cosmology. III. Title. B398.C67M64 2005 113.092-dc22 2005032661
Four essays by Richard D. Mohr reprinted with permission of the editors:
1. Family Resemblance, Platonism, Universals in Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Vol. VII, No. 3 (Sept 1977), pp. 593-600. 2. The Formation of the Cosmos in the Statesman Myth in Phoenix (Journal of the Classical Association of Canada), Vol. 32, No. 3 (1978), pp. 250-52 3. The Divided Line and the Doctrine of Recollection in Plato in Apeiron (a journal for ancient philosophy and science, by permission of Academic Printing and Publishing), Vol. XVIII, No. 1 (1984), pp. 34-41 4. The Number Theory in Plato s Republic VII and Philebus in Isis , Vol. 72, No. 264 (Dec 1981), pp. 620-27. Published by the University of Chicago Press. 1981 by the History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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for Robert W. Switzer


For whom it is not unusual to work through virtually everything together with me.
-Plato s Sophist 218b
CONTENTS
Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition (2005)
From the Original Preface (1985)
Introduction: Themes and Theses
Part One: The Works of Reason: Timaeus 27d-47e
I. Divinity, Cognition, and Ontology: The Unique World Argument
II. Plato on Time and Eternity
Part Two: The Effects of Necessity: Timaeus 48a-69a
III. Image, Flux, and Space in the Timaeus
IV. The Gold Analogy in the Timaeus
V. Remarks on the Stereometric Nature and Status of the Primary Bodies in the Timaeus
VI. The Mechanism of Flux in the Timaeus
Part Three: The Other Cosmological Writings
VII. Disorderly Motion in the Statesman
VIII. The Sources of the Evil Problem and the Principle of Motion Doctrine in the Phaedrus and Laws
IX. The World-Soul in the Platonic Cosmology ( Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus )
X. The Relation of Reason to Soul in the Platonic Cosmology: Sophist 248e-249d
XI. The Platonic Theodicy: Laws X, 899-905
Part Four: Related Essays on Plato s Metaphysics
XII. Family Resemblance, Platonism, Universals
XIII. The Formation of the Cosmos in the Statesman Myth
XIV. The Divided Line and the Doctrine of Recollection in Plato
XV. The Number Theory in Plato s Republic VII and Philebus
Extensions (2005)
Bibliography of Works Cited
PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION (2005)
This book is an expanded edition of my 1985 book The Platonic Cosmology (Brill). Since the original work had to be re-keyed, I have taken the opportunity to update and revise its original chapters-correcting errors, discussing some of the secondary literature that has piled up in the intervening twenty years, and, here and there, trying to clarify positions and strengthen arguments. The positions taken and the conclusions reached, though, are for the most part unchanged. The original chapters have been supplemented with four additional essays that I wrote during the general period in which the book was written and that bear on some of its more general claims about Plato. These supplemental essays cover the nature of universals, a debate about temporal creation in Plato, recollection s relation to the Divided Line, and the nature of numbers in Plato. In addition, I have written for this edition a new essay, Extensions, which draws together and develops some general thoughts that in the original book appeared only as wisps or stems. It tries to place Plato s cosmological commitments in the Timaeus , Statesman , and Philebus into a wider metaphysical context.
This is a book about how, for Plato, God makes the world. Unlike in the Catholic story about how God makes the world, God in this story does not make the world out of nothing. Indeed he doesn t make the world out of anything-even though he is chiefly characterized as a craftsman or, more simply, maker 1 There is making and there is making. Plato s God has not read the second book of Aristotle s Physics and so does not know that one makes things by making them out of matter. On that view, one first finds some indeterminate stuff and then one imposes upon it a form, property, or shape where there was no form, property or shape before. Plato s God does not work like a carver who whittles an amorphous chunk of driftwood into a cube, nor like an artisan who pours molten brass into a mold to make a bell, ball-bearing, or Bird in Flight. Neither does Plato s craftsman God make the world out of discrete components by assemblage. He does not make things by taking bits which have determinate characters (forms, properties, shapes), but no order among them, and by putting them into an arrangement create order. He does not work like a tile setter making a mosaic mural out of tessera, nor like a child on Christmas morning making a Ferris Wheel out of an Erector Set- some assembly required.
Plato s craftsman God or Demiurge, as he sets out to create the heavens, is not confronted with either formless matter or determinate bits. Rather he has been reading the neglected Milesian philosophers, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and knows that the phenomenal realm which confronts him is a booming, buzzing confusion of instances of determinable properties, say, of temperature, speed, thickness, height, and compactness, which-the instances, that is-career along scales of increase and decrease, slide along gradients of more and less, become hotter and colder, faster and slower, stouter or svelter, higher and lower, denser and rarer, drier and wetter, louder and softer, and the like. He improves upon the confusion by introducing measures into it, by eliminating from it excesses and deficiencies as the instances slide along the various gradients. This sort of making involves three sorts of skill and expertise. First, the craftsman himself has to have the ability to shift the instances of properties along the scales upon which they, on their own, slide. He needs to be like a doctor who knows how to raise and lower the temperature of an alternatingly chilled and fevered patient. Second, he must be able to fix the instance at a certain degree on the scale, like the doctor who arrests and holds the patient s temperature at a chosen degree. Finally, beyond these preliminary skills, the craftsman God needs to know what point on the scale of degrees is the right degree at which to fix the instance of the property. The good doctor needs to know that 98.6 F is the right degree at which to fix the patient s temperature. When he fixes the instance at the degree on the scale dictated by the standard, he has done his job. The craftsman God, like the accomplished doctor, needs a standard or measure. Yet this standard is not something that can be discovered simply by examining the scale of degrees upon which an instance of a property slides. The standard is off the scale. It is something like a meter stick, a thermometer, or a template, something by reference to which we assess and identify other things. And so if the Demiurge is to improve the world, he needs to have access to objects that serve as standards and which are not part of the phenomenal realm. These standards and measures Plato calls Forms or Ideas. 2 They provide content for God s good intentions to craft. His good intentions and the world the way it is given to him are not sufficient for its improvement. Forms are essential to the nature of his craft.
And Forms are essential for there being any phenomena in the first place. Before the creation of the measured world, the phenomena are fleeting non-substantial images, like shadows on walls, images on water, and reflections in mirrors. To exist such images must have two things. They must have a medium, on which they appear, but which does not enter into them. Plato calls this medium the receptacle of space. And they must have originals which determine both what the images are images of and which must persist if the images are to exist. Plato calls these originals Forms. Without Forms there are no phenomena. Both God and Forms have distinct roles in Plato s metaphysics, roles that can not be reduced to elements of other philosophers metaphysics nor be explained away as metaphysical luxuries within his own system.
When The Platonic Cosmology appeared in 1985, scholarly study of the Timaeus , Plato s chief cosmological work, was almost a wasteland. 3 In the mid-1950s, the dialogue with its ontological refulgence had been exiled from the late dialogues to Plato s middle period where its expellers thought it could live in comfortable retirement along with the metaphysical excesses of Socrates Autobiography in the Phaedo , the Ladder of Love in the Symposium , the analogies of Sun, Line, and Cave in Republic VI-VII, and the Great Speech of the Phaedrus . 4 Placed there, the dialogue could be forgotten without loss and the late dialogues would thereby be made safe for an agenda laid out initially in 1939 by Gilbert Ryle to the effect that in the late dialogues Plato had given up metaphysics for conceptual analysis-and praise be that he had done so. 5 For a couple