Plato's Cosmology, Francis M. Comford

                     Paperback Reprint edition (September 1997)
                     Hackett Pub Co; ISBN: 0872203867

meaning is more fully expressed at 52B, where Space is said to be, apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning'. To ,partake of the intelligible' will then. mean ,to be an object of rational thought', as opposed to being an object of the senses. Further discussion may be postponed to that later passage where Space has at last been mentioned.

In the present passage (where Space has not been mentio4 the words eIdoz, idea, morfh, ~ still bear the sense implied by t& whole context: they mean sensible qualities, not shapes'. 11-last sentence speaks of part of the Receptacle being made fiery, part liquefied (made watery>, and so on. The same language is used of the chaos described at 52D as existing before the Heaven was made or the Demiurge had designed the geometrical figures GE the primary bodies. Plato's point is that the Receptacle has no inherent sensible qualities of its own, not that ,Space has no specific ,, shape ,,of its own ,>or that ,we are not allowed to account for exceptional cc appearances" in any region, as those who think of space as having a variable curvature would like to do, by suggesting that this region has a ,,different', geometry from others ,~1 lt is a much more tenable position that, according to Plato5 Space has a shape of its 0w", being coextensive with the spherical universe, 6utside which there is neither body nor void.2

5IB-E. Ideal models of Fire, Air, Water, Earth

Plato has just spoken of ,copies (mimhmata) of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth being ,received' by the Receptacle. This leads to the next question: Are there models to serve as originals for these copies?

1 Tr., pp. 326, 328.

2 See F. M. Cornford, The Invention of Space, Essays in honour of Gilbert Murray, Oxford, 1936.

3 The emphasis falls, by position, on AJyq>, <by argument,> as opposed to <what can be gathered from our earlier statements' in the previous sen-tence. Cf. the contrast of d apeat Ädyos (A4or in the true sense) and 6 <lkw's

(56B, 4>.

4 7OLGurfl'v *X'i>'Oaav, the independent and absolute reality, just mentioned, such as we aseribe to Forms. So Stallbaum, A.-H.

primary bodies of which all other bodies are composed are the two classes of things in the physical world with the best claim to separate Forms. when it comes to hair, dirt, and other such undignified things, Socrates at first thinks it would be absurd to postulate Forms; these must be no more than <just the things we see 1 .

The present passage is concerned mainly with Forms of the primary bodies; and the reality of these Forms is affirmed on the same general grounds that make it necessary to believe in any Forms whatsoever. As in Republic v, the existence of two orders of objects~intelhgible and sensible-is declared to follow from the indubitable distinction between rational understanding or know-ledge and mere belief, which can be produced or shaken by persuasion. This characteristic Qf belief, even when true, was taken in the Theaetetus (201A) as fatal to the claim of true belief to rank as knowledge. Belief, moreover, can ,give no account of itself " ,. This characteristic is best illustrated by the Meno. The slave questioned by Socrates has produced true beijeis about the solution of a problem in geometry; but they will not become knowledge until he has been taken many times through the whole demonstration, grasped all the premisses3 and seen how the conclusion must inevitably follow. His beliefs will then be unshakably secured by reflection on the reason' (Meno, 85c if., 97 E).

lt is certain, then, that there are independently real Forms of Eire, Air, Water, and Earth. Fire , just in itself is an eternal model, an object of intelligence, not of perception. We have been told that the name' Fire ,is to be given to that which is of a certain quality, appearing in the Receptacle at any time in the cycle of change. This quality is the copy, bearing the same name as its model; the model itself is the meaning of the name ,Eire', more or less clearly present to our thought whenever we use the word. Plato tells US nothing further as to its nature. It cannot be identified with the pyramid, the geometrical shape of the fire corpuscle. When we look at a fire, we do not see or think of pyramids; and when we say <Here is fire' we do not mean ,Here are pyramids'. what we perceive is a certain combination of shifting qualities in a certain place at a certain time---the yellowness we see, the hotness we feel. Such a combination, whenever and wherever it occurs, is sufficiently <alike' for US to name it ,fire ,, and it is a fleeting copy or impress of an unchanging model. More than this Plato cannot tell US. We must not hope to get nearer

to his thought by translating his words into language that sounds to US scientific.1

There is no warrant for A.-H. ,s remark that ,the list of ideas in the Timaeus includes, in addition to the ideas of living creatures, only the ideas of lire, air, water and earth' (,>. r8o>. In his introduction he goes further and suggests that Plato ought to have eliminated ideal types of the elements and would have eliminated them, ,had his attention been drawn to the subject' (,>.35).:

The unprejudiced reader may think that his attention was very dearly drawn to the subject in the passage before US. Nor will the Platonist easily believe that living creatures and the primary bodies alone have ideal Forms. How are mathematics and dialectic to be carried on, if the only unchanging objects of thought are the natural kinds of living creatures and the four primary bodies? These are specially relevant to an account of the physical universe, and are therefore prominent in the Timaeus. We cannot infer that Plato no longer believed that there was such a thing as Justice 4 just in itself> or the Triangle ,just in itself'. The Philebus and ie Laws would not bear out such a conclusion.

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1 Tr. (p, 334)1 for instance, says: ,The question is whether there is or is not a standard of scientific truth by which individuals can and ought to correct the deliverances of their senses.' 4 Eire means the occurrence of events with some definite law or pattern in a region of the continuum, water in the appearance of events of a different determinate pattern. lt follows at once that only when this pattern is exactly realised do you have ,,real ~, or pure >, fire or water 1£ it is only imperfectly realised, you have not ,, pure Ire or water> just as we should say that ,,water" which proved on analysis not to be composed of hydrogen and oxygen in the proportions determined by the chemists is not ,,pure ,,water, but has" impurities".' Platos phrase " Fire just in itself' means, according to Tr.. , ,,Fire which is just fire," ,,fire with no admixture of anything else>', exactly as we speak of ,,pure water"9 au pure atmospheric air', ,,pure gold".' This account is in danger of suggesting a confusion between an exact realisation ot the pattern and the pattern itself. When we speak of ,pure water' we mean something which, supposing it to exist, would be a perceptible thing which we could touch and drink.

Robin's account of the Form of Fire (Phys. de Platon 49) keeps nearer to Plato's own account> but involves theories about mathematical intermediates between Forms and sensibles and about Ideal Number which arc too speculative for the scope of this book.

2 In the Journal of Philol. XXiV, pp 49 if., Archer-Hind went the whole way and denied that the ontology of the Tirnaeus allows room for these ideas.

and their combinations, and finally to the ideal models. Next follows a summary description of these three factors, in the reverse order.

1 Taking aei with on (cf. A.-H.). The words are separated for the sake of euphony. Ci. 28k, 6, pros 7a gar& ravr'& £TMXOV ßA6n£üv a'613 where dEt belongs to Cxov.

3 Cf. Aristotle> Phys. iv, 1, 208a, 29. ,Everybody supposes that things which exist are somewhere; the non-existent is ,, nowirere ,-where is the goat-stag or nie sphinx?' Simplic. ad 10£ describes tilis as a <parody' of our passage. Zeno (Vors. 19A, 24) assumed in one of his arguments that

? Everything niat exists is somewhere' or in some place D Gorgias (quoted below) repeats this.