Book Review: Plato's Timaeus: One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato's Timaeus Today

Abstract

PLATO'S TIMAEUS One Book, The Whole Universe: Plato's Timaeus Today. Edited by Richard D. Mohr and Barbara M. Sattler (Parmenides Publishing, Las Vegas, 2010). Pp. 406. $87 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-30972-32-2.Plato's Timaeus is, arguably, the single most influential work ever written by a Greek philosopher. It generated massive controversies already in Antiquity. Was the account of how the cosmos came to be to be taken literally, or merely figuratively? How should we understand the Demiurge or Craftsman? When we are told the account is an eikos muthos or eikos logos, what precisely does that mean? Above all both Plato's supporters and his critics have to come to terms with his teleology. The issues continue to be hotly debated in modern scholarship. This collection of 21 essays stems from a conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 2007 and is exceptional in that it includes contributions not just from many of the foremost specialists in Greek philosophy, but also from physicists and architects.Among the former we have Tony Long on cosmic craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism, Charles Kahn on the place of cosmology in Plato's later dialogues, Ian Mueller on some neo-Platonic interpretations of Plato's views on matter, Alan Code on Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's views on weight, Alex Mourelatos on the epistemology of the Proem. Although Myles Burnyeat was not there, his views on the status of eikos (as appropriate or reasonable) are taken up not just by Mourelatos, but also by Tom Robinson, Gabor Betegh and Kathryn Morgan.But among the chapters by non-specialists, the physicist Anthony Leggett discusses resonances of the Timaeus in modern physics and cosmology where he argues that Plato at least asks the right questions (though it seems debatable whether the questions are indeed the same when the conditions for answering them change so fundamentally). Ton Solomon examines how the Atlantis story has been used in film, while Anthony Vidler investigates how that story has been used to create an image of the authority of architecture. Ann Bergren finds echoes of the dialogue in the branch of contemporary architectural design known as 'animate form', illustrating this from the work of Greg Lynn and Elena Manfredini, while the book ends with another chapter by a physicist, Sean Connell, who balances a recognition of the enormous progress in physics and cosmology with an acknowledgement that there is so much, about entropy and the arrow of time, for instance, that remains unclear.This bare enumeration of just some of the contributions already indicates the multifarious character of the collection. …