One book, the whole universe : Plato's Timaeus today

416 Pages·2010·31.538 MB·English

by  Sattler, Barbara M., Plato., Mohr, Richard D

O n e B o o k
The Whole Universe

O n e B o o k
The Whole Universe
Plato’s Timaeus Today
Edited by
Richard D. Mohr
and Barbara M. Sattler
Las Vegas | Zurich | Athens
PARMENIDES PUBLISHING
Las Vegas | Zurich | Athens
© 2010 Parmenides Publishing
All rights reserved.
Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-930972-32-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-930972-61-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
One book, the whole universe : Plato’s Timaeus today / edited by Richard D. Mohr
and Barbara M. Sattler
p. cm.
Proceedings of a conference held Sept. 13–16, 2007 at the University of Illinois (Urbana).
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-930972-32-2 (pbk.)
1. Plato. Timaeus. 2. Cosmogony, Ancient. I. Mohr, Richard D. II. Sattler, Barbara
M., 1974–
B387.O53 2010
113–dc22
2010000651
Typeset in Garamond and OdysseaUBSU (Greek), and Indexed by 1106 Design,
www.1106design.com. | Cover design by theBookDesigners.com
Printed and lay-fl at bound by Edwards Brothers, Inc., www.edwardsbrothers.com.
Necessity (from “Finian’s Rainbow”), p. 7. Lyrics by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg.
Music by Burtan Lane. Copyright © 1946 (Renewed) Glocca Morra Music and Chappell & Co., Inc.
Glocca Morra Music administered by Next Decade Entertainment, Inc.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
Selected Images from Embryological House (1999), p. 345,
Imaginary Forces New York (2000), p. 352, and Bloom House (2008), p. 353,
reproduced with permission from Greg Lynn FORM, Venice, CA.
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
Selected Images from Clad Cuts (2005), p. 365, Merletti ‘Lace’ (2006), pp. 367–368,
Cherry Blossom (2007), p. 366, and Fabric Tower (2008), pp. 369–370,
reproduced with permission from Elena Manferdini / Atelier Manferdini, Venice, CA
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
Images of the “Filigree Headdresses Worn by Miao Women,” p. 369, reproduced with permission
from Photographer Weizhong (Frank) Chen and Weizhong Chen Visual Art Center | www.cwz9.com.
Image of the Hubble Deep Field, p. 376, reproduced with permission from the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA);
S. Beckwith, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI),
and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) Team.
1-888-PARMENIDES
www.parmenides.com
www.platostimaeustoday.com
Table of Contents
“Necessity” vii
Plato’s Cosmic Manual: Introduction, Reader’s Guide, and Acknowledgments 1
Richard D. Mohr
Notes on Contributors 27
I. The Big Questions
1. Plato’s Timaeus: Some Resonances in Modern Physics and Cosmology 31
Anthony J. Leggett
II. God and Related Matters
2. Cosmic Craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism 37
Anthony A. Long
3. Philosopher-Kings and Craftsman-Gods 55
Allan Silverman
4. The Place of Cosmology in Plato’s Later Dialogues 69
Charles H. Kahn
5. Maker or Father? The Demiurge from Plutarch to Plotinus 79
Matthias Vorwerk
6. Plato on (just about) Everything: Some Observations on the Timaeus
and Other Dialogues 101
Thomas M. Robinson
III. Space, Place, and Motion: The Receptacle of Becoming
7. Visualizing Platonic Space 117
Donald Zeyl
8. The Receptacle and the Primary Bodies: Something from Nothing? 131
Verity Harte
9. The Timaeus and the Critique of Presocratic Vortices 141
Stephen Menn
10. What’s the Matter? Some Neo-Platonist Answers 151
Ian Mueller
11. Derrida’s Khôra, or Unnaming the Timaean Receptacle 165
Zina Giannopoulou
IV. Aristotle’s Timaeus
12. Should Aristotle Have Recognized Final Causes in Plato’s Timaeus? 179
Thomas K. Johansen
13. Aristotle on Plato on Weight 201
Alan Code
V. Reason and Myth
14. What Makes a Myth eikôs? Remarks Inspired by Myles Burnyeat’s
EIKÔS MYTHOS 213
Gábor Betegh
15. The Epistemological Section (29b–d) of the Proem in Timaeus’
Speech: M. F. Burnyeat on eikôs mythos, and comparison with
Xenophanes B34 and B35 225
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
VI. Time, Narrative, and Myth
16. A Time for Learning and for Counting: Egyptians, Greeks, and
Empirical Processes in Plato’s Timaeus 249
Barbara M. Sattler
17. Narrative Orders in the Timaeus and Critias 267
Kathryn A. Morgan
18. Timaeus in Tinseltown: Atlantis in Film 287
Jon Solomon
VII. Timaean Architecture: Timber Framing the Universe and
Building Today
19. The Atlantis Effect: The Lost Origins of Architecture 329
Anthony Vidler
20. Plato’s Timaeus and the Aesthetics of “Animate Form” 343
Ann Bergren
VIII. Ever After, Ever Before
21. Time and Change in an Eternal Universe 373
Sean M. Carroll
Index Locorum 383
General Index 395
“Necessity”
What is the curse
That makes the universe
So all bewilderin’?
What is the hoax
That just provokes the folks
They call God’s childerin?
What is the jinx
That gives a body
And his brother
And ev’ry one aroun’
The run aroun’?
Necessity, necessity
That most unnecessary thing,
Necessity.
What throws the monkey wrench in
A fellow’s good intention,
That nasty old invention,
Necessity!
My feet wanna dance in the sun,
My head wants to rest in the shade,
The Lord says, “Go out and have fun,”
But the landlord says,
“Your rent ain’t paid!”
Necessity,
It’s plain to see
What a lovely old world
This silly old world
Could be—
But man, it’s all in a mess
Account of necessity.
Necessity, necessity
There ought to be a law against necessity.
I’d love to play some tennis,
Or take a trip to Venice,
But sister, here’s the menace,
Necessity.
Old Satan’s the father of sin
And Cupid’s the father of love.
Oh, hell is the father of gin
But no one knows the father of
Necessity, Necessity,
That’s the maximum
That a minimum
Thing can be.
There’s nothing lower than less,
Unless it’s Necessity.
— E. Y. “YIP” HARBURG
“Necessity” is a lyric from the renowned musical play, Finian’s Rainbow (1947). Music by Burton Lane.
Plato’s Cosmic Manual:
Introduction, Reader’s Guide, and Acknowledgements
Richard D. Mohr
Introduction
This collection of essays brings together physicists, philosophers, classicists,
and architects to assess the meaning and impact of one of the most profound
and influential works of Western letters—Plato’s Timaeus, a work which
comes as close as any to giving a comprehensive account of life, the universe,
and everything, and does so in a startlingly narrow compass. Its core is but
sixty-five pages long.
This core gives an account of the nature of god and creation, a theory of
knowledge that explains various grades of cognition, a comprehensive taxonomy
of the soul and perception, and an account of the objects that gods and souls
might know or encounter, call them collectively, in John Wesley’s phrase, the
furniture of the universe. The analytical inventory of this furniture includes
theories of what is and is not eternal, of the basic constituents of material objects,
of how material objects compound into large scale, even cosmic, structures,
of time and of space. There are elaborate accounts of both physical processes
and life processes, the nature of making, morality, sickness and health. There
are even accounts of accounts, of what can and cannot be said. We have then,
in a single book the length of a modest novella, a comprehensive theology,
metaphysics, physics, epistemology, and psychology, with significant excursions
into logic, biology, astronomy, medicine, and ethics.
Hovering over all of this is the notion that the objects and structures in
the world around us—both sub-atomic and cosmic—are, at some deep level,
perhaps the deepest level, mathematical constructs. Building on a cosmic scale
consists of adjusting ratios and measures found in the materials that confront
the builder. Structures at the largest scale are numerical progressions, while
the sub-atomic components of the primary bodies, earth, air, fire, and water,
are not granules or other bits of stuff, but triangles and squares. When, in
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the ultimate
question of life, the universe, and everything turns out to be the number
1
2 plato’s TIMAEUS today
forty-two, we are meant to chuckle at both the incongruity and the banality
of the answer, but we have in fact wandered deep into Platonic turf. What is
basic is quantitative, not qualitative. The basic constituents of material reality
are going to be things like number, proportion, and the regular polyhedrons,
not properties like yellow, blue, warm-blooded, feathered, hot, cold, dry, wet.
Hardly any historians of thought now believe that Plato personally made
any significant contributions to mathematics, but his basic vision that the
intelligibility of physical reality is fundamentally mathematical has turned
out to be right, at least as things now stand in science. Those who view vari-
ous elements of Plato’s theology and metaphysics as at best bloated, should
remember that he held out the correct model for science unheralded for
over two thousand years until Kepler used regular polyhedrons, the Platonic
solids, to get astronomy and, by analogy, all of science back operating on a
mathematical paradigm.
It is not surprising then that physicists remain fascinated by the Timaeus,
even when they reject what many see as its metaphysical excesses. In this vol-
ume, we have two contrasting physicists. Sir Anthony Leggett, 2003 Nobel
Laureate for Physics, gives a sympathetic account of the Timaeus’ general bear-
ings, while astrophysicist Sean Carroll, the New York Times’ go-to guy for all
things cosmological, thinks we can get along just fine without the Timaeus as
an intellectual antecedent. Two additional contrasting essays explore the extent
to which Plato’s geometrizing of the universe is a coherent project. Thomas
Johansen argues that Plato overreaches in this project, while Alan Code argues
that the geometrizing project has been misunderstood.
So we have gods, some eternal objects, material objects, space, time, and
numbers. But wait, there’s more. In addition to the Timaeus’ synoptic presen-
tation of life, the universe, and everything, the dialogue and its companion
fragment, the Critias, present one thing more, myth. They contain one of
the West’s most enduring myths, the legend of Atlantis. As disappointing as
the news may be to some New Age-ers and mystics, it appears that the myth
is wholly an invention of Plato’s imagination. Near the start of the Timaeus,
Critias gives a short version of the myth, which he holds to be an account
of actual history, but which no critics now think Plato believed to be actual
history. Critias begins to give the full version of the myth as the dialogue
named after him, but this ‘dialogue’ breaks off in mid-sentence after only
a dozen pages of what is mostly geographical description. The body of the
Timaeus, that is, Timaeus’ account of life, the universe, and everything, is
wedged in between the short version and the severely truncated, long version
of the myth.
The myth recounts events said to have occurred nine thousand years in
the past. At that time, the evil island empire of Atlantis has a world-historical
battle with a wholly just Athens, an Athens that realizes the principles of the