A review by casparb
Timaeus and Critias, by Plato, Andrew Gregory
4.0
Ok spicy ones! I was looking forward to Timaeus and wasn't disappointed. Critias I read on a whim, as it continues from T.
So I'm thinking mostly of Timaeus here. I think it's the text which makes Plato the most difficult to reconcile with for Christian orthodoxies a few centuries later. But there are plenty of shared ideas with contemporary Jewish metaphysics, it seems to me. Certainly the image of the Demiurge and the immortal as fiery circles brought to mind the apparition of angels in the blazing opening of Ezekiel.
Critias is mostly about Atlantis - for those that weren't aware, these dialogues are (I think?) the originary sources on the topic. This is why depictions of Atlantis in pop culture tend to have a Grecian aesthetic. I think Critias would be most fruitfully read against the Republic? It wasn't the more riveting of the two.
The metaphysics of Timaeus are an awful lot. Was impressed. There are passages here that I see in very contemporary philosophy - 'being is to becoming what truth is to belief'.
We are circles upon circles. O you who turn the wheel etc etc. The divine form. EZ again: I will overturn, overturn, overturn.
The text is rather down on women in more peculiar ways than we are accustomed to from texts of its type: 'He who lived well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed existence; but, if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of some animal'. Besides this being frankly bizarre, I think one could draw interesting inferences about gender from the conception of 'woman as purgatory'.
So I'm thinking mostly of Timaeus here. I think it's the text which makes Plato the most difficult to reconcile with for Christian orthodoxies a few centuries later. But there are plenty of shared ideas with contemporary Jewish metaphysics, it seems to me. Certainly the image of the Demiurge and the immortal as fiery circles brought to mind the apparition of angels in the blazing opening of Ezekiel.
Critias is mostly about Atlantis - for those that weren't aware, these dialogues are (I think?) the originary sources on the topic. This is why depictions of Atlantis in pop culture tend to have a Grecian aesthetic. I think Critias would be most fruitfully read against the Republic? It wasn't the more riveting of the two.
The metaphysics of Timaeus are an awful lot. Was impressed. There are passages here that I see in very contemporary philosophy - 'being is to becoming what truth is to belief'.
We are circles upon circles. O you who turn the wheel etc etc. The divine form. EZ again: I will overturn, overturn, overturn.
The text is rather down on women in more peculiar ways than we are accustomed to from texts of its type: 'He who lived well would return to his native star, and would there have a blessed existence; but, if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of some animal'. Besides this being frankly bizarre, I think one could draw interesting inferences about gender from the conception of 'woman as purgatory'.