Journal articles on the topic 'Plato Timaeus Critias'

This paper takes issue with the thesis of Rashed and Auffret that the Critias that has come down to us is not a genuine dialogue of Plato. Authors do not consider the style of the Critias, which should be a factor in any complete study of authorship. It observes the widespread consensus that the style of the Timaeus and Critias are virtually inseparable. It surveys a wide range of stylistic studies that have tended to confirm this, before answering a possible objection that cites the similarity of style between the genuine Laws and Philip of Opus’ Epinomis. Since the main argument used by Rashed and Auffret relies on an inconsistency between Timaeus and Critias consideration is given to the types of inconsistency found within Platonic dialogues and sequences of dialogues, particularly the hiatus-avoiding dialogues including Timaeus itself and Laws. Finally, alternative explanations of the alleged inconsistency are offered.

There has been much scholarly disagreement concerning Plato’s participation in the mid-fourth century debates over Athens’s ancestral constitution ( patrios politeia). This disunity stems from contrasting views about the relationship between philosophy and Athenian politics in Plato’s writings. Recently, several political theorists have reoriented our general understanding about Plato’s complex involvement with Athenian politics. However, these discussions do not discuss Plato’s specific relationship with patrios politeia. In order to bridge this gap, I turn to two dialogues within the later Platonic corpus: Timaeus and Critias. By examining the Atlantis myth that spans both dialogues, I discuss how Plato uses the story both to comment on and critique the democratic Athenian constitution. At the same time, however, Plato also advances a unique veneration of democracy by asserting that it is the politeia of the gods. In this way, I argue that Timaeus-Critias contributes a valuable new perspective in the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between Plato’s philosophy and democracy.

Plato Through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues, Zdravko Planinc, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003, pp. xii, 134Professor Planinc analyzes in this monograph three of Plato's dialogues: the Timaeus, the Critias and the Phaedrus. His primary aim is to show that their structure and poetic imagery is modelled after that of important episodes of Homer's Odyssey. In Planinc's words, Plato consciously “refigures” the “literary tropes” of the Odyssey, and this fact is of central importance to interpreting these dialogues properly (13).

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the Timaeus’ introduction (17a-27a) in order to show that Plato invites the reader to demystify the discourses of the Greek political elite of the fifth century. Dreamy land, in the autochtony myth, or ocean of nightmare, in Atlantis, khôra is the aporia of the story of Critias. Compared with Republic, this khôra is in fact the phobic projection of the aristocracy’s annoyed desires.
 http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_15_3

Scholarly debate on the relationship between Cicero’s De republica (On the Republic) and De Legibus (On the Laws) and the thought of Plato tends to focus on the supposed congruities or incongruities of the De republica and De legibus with Plato’s own Republic and Laws. Still, Plato’s discussion of ideal constitutions is not constrained to the Republic and Laws. In this essay I propose that we look to another of Plato’s dialogues for fruitful comparison: the Timaeus-Critias duology. In this essay I bring these two texts into substantive dialogue to illuminate mysterious features of both. Sketched in these complementary passages, I think, is an outline for a particular kind of approach to political theory, one proposed as novel by Cicero’s Laelius, but, as this essay hopes to show, with an interesting forerunner in Plato. I’ve called this approach ‘retrospective ideal political philosophy’ (RIPP). I end my essay with a few prospective theoretical notes on how this approach binds these two texts together.

Most scholars take Atlantis as Plato’s invention to promote his political ideal articulated in his masterwork The Republic. This paper points out that the green Sahara period encompasses the time of Atlantis according to Plato’s records. The transitions between the green Sahara and desert Sahara were controlled by the water cycle stability in the Atlas Basin, an area fitting all the features of the Atlas Empire as described in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. The historical account of Atlantis by Plato is compared with the newly identified site, the timelines of climate changes, a likely hydrological process, and the geographical profiles in the Atlas Basin.

The article for the first time makes a comparative analysis of the concepts of the Cosmos and the Earth of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and the founder of astronautics K.E. Tsiolkovsky. A hypothesis is put forward that the philosophical basis for writing the fantastic story “Out of the Earth” by Tsiolkovsky is the interpretation of the Cosmos and the Earth from Plato’s dialogues “Phaedo”, “Timaeus”, “Critias”. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that for the first time the deep penetration of Plato’s philosophy into the structure of Tsiolkovsky’s story “Out of the Earth” is revealed. The relevance of the study is due to the lack of coverage of this scientific problem. The definitions Cosmos, Earth are given in the understanding of Plato and Tsiolkovsky. The results of a comparative analysis of the concepts of Cosmos and Earth, the interpretation of the terms kalos cosmos, epimeleia heautou (take care of yourself) in Plato’s dialogues and in Tsiolkovsky’s story “Out of the Earth” are presented. It is suggested that the concept of the ideal Cosmos and the probability of the death of the Earth in the Platonic sense are implied in the text of the story “Out of the Earth” to solve scientific and creative problems of the early twentieth century — space flights and the creation of space settlements. The influence of Plato’s dialogues “Phaedo”, “Timaeus”, “Critias” on the style of Tsiolkovsky’s story is revealed. The questions of the originality of the genre of Tsiolkovsky’s story, its artistic features, the role of dialogues, ekphrasis are considered. It is proved that the concept of dual worlds of the ancient Greek philosopher is invariably traced in the storylines, landscape sketches, in the dialogues of the heroes of the story “Out of the Earth”. This idea of Plato will become the main one in the philosophy of Tsiolkovsky. Resettlement in space, in his opinion, means for mankind familiarization with the Cosmos — a perfect beautiful creation. Life in space settlements will save people from suffering, disease, war and give them immortality. An analysis of the concepts of Cosmos and Earth by Plato and Tsiolkovsky allows us to conclude that the idealistic views of Plato acquired a technogenic, purely materialistic, realistic embodiment in the work of Tsiolkovsky and became an incentive for technological progress, opening up new ways for the development of mankind.

Вопрос о том, в чьи уста вложена Платоном в «Тимее» и «Критии» легенда об Атлантиде дискуссионен. Согласно традиционной точке зрения, рассказывающий ее Критий тождественен известному олигарху конца V в. до н.э. Критию, сыну Каллесхра (дяде Платона), в 404–403 гг. до н.э. возглавлявшему репрессивный режим «Тридцати тиранов» в Афинах. Однако такая идентификация Крития вышеупомянутых диалогов порождает непреодолимые хронологические трудности. В свое время по эпиграфическим данным стал известен другой Критий (сын Леаида), дед «тирана», и крайне велика вероятность того, что именно он выведен Платоном в ка-честве действующего лица «Тимея» и «Крития». Обоснованию этого тезиса посвящена эта часть статьи. В том случае, если он верен, перед нами предстает целая семья, в которой крайне-олигархические воззрения передавались по наследству. Данное положение хорошо согласуется с тем фактом, что еще один представитель этой семьи – Каллесхр (отец младшего Крития и сын старшего) – тоже был политиком-олигархом. Debatable is the question as to into whose mouth the Atlantis legend of the Timaeusand Critias was put by Plato. According to the traditional opinion, Critias, who tells it, is identical with the noted late fifth-century B.C. oligarch Critias son of Callaeschrus (Plato’s uncle), who was at the head of the repressive “Thirty tyrants” regime in Athensin 404–403 B.C. However, such an identification of Critias gives rise to very serious and insurmountable chronological difficulties. Some time ago, another Critias (son of Leaides), the “tyrant”’ grandfather, became known from epigraphic data, and extremely likely is possibility that it is he who was depicted by Plato as a character of the Timaeus and Critias. This part of the article is devoted to the substantiation of this thesis. If it is correct, an entire family appears before us, in which extremely oligarchic position was hereditary. Such a situation is well agreed with the fact that another member of the family, Callaeschrus (father of the younger Critias and son of the elder one) was also an oligarchic politician.

Plato is often read as a philosopher of objectivity and exteriority, as, primarily, a metaphysician, yet philosophers of interiority have relied upon Plato in turning to the subject. What did they find in Plato? A consideration of one issue central to Plato and Platonism, the distinction between opinion and knowledge and the resulting problem of the status and value of our cognition of sensibles, reveals that a locus classicus for the metaphysical reading of Plato, Republic V, 477cd, contains within it a long-overlooked invitation to turn inward and pursue an interior study of psyche and its ways of thinking, a methodology. A review of early Platonists’ attempts to grapple with the problem of our cognition of sensibles reveals the dominance of the metaphysical approach, its common pitfalls, and the need for as well as the potential of a complementary methodological approach. Although the early Platonists tended to deal with psyche metaphysically, at times the exigencies of inquiry do seem to have pushed them to consider it more interiorly. Insights into the principles and results of a methodological approach can be gleaned from their efforts. A consideration of Plato’s treatment of psyche and opinion in the dialogues, especially the Timaeus-Critias, helps fill out the picture, suggests a possible solution to the problem of our cognition of sensibles, and gives the impression that Plato regards the interior methodological approach, not as a way of supplanting metaphysics, but rather as a way of rendering it more critical and concrete. Платона часто прочитывают как философа объективности и «внешности», как в первую очередь метафизика, однако именно на Платона полагались философы «внутренности», обращаясь к субъекту. Что они находили в Платоне? Рассмотрение одного вопроса, центрального для Платона и платонизма, а именно различия между мнением и знанием, как и вытекающей отсюда проблемы статуса и ценности нашего постижения чувственных вещей, обнаруживает, что locus classicus метафизического прочтения Платона, R. V, 477cd, содержит давно игнорировавшееся приглашение обратиться внутрь и заняться внутренним исследованием души и ее способов мышления, некую методологию. Обзор попыток ранних платоников решить проблему нашего постижения чувственных вещей раскрывает преобладание метафизического подхода с его обычными подвохами, а вместе с тем — необходимость и возможность комплементарного методологического подхода. Пусть ранние платоники и выказывали тенденцию рассматривать душу метафизически, порой логика исследования всё же заставляла их подходить к ней в более «внутреннем» ключе. Их усилия позволяют разглядеть принципы и результаты иного методологического подхода. Платоновская трактовка души и мнения в диалогах, особенно в «Тимее-Критии», помогает восполнить картину, подсказывает возможное решение проблемы нашего постижения чувственных вещей и наводит на мысль, что сам Платон воспринимал «внутренний» методологический подход не как способ вытеснить метафизику, а скорее как способ сделать ее более критичной и конкретной.

In his seminal 1968 study of Francis Bacon's political thought, Howard B. White argued that the New Atlantis is “a rewriting of a Platonic myth, and a rewriting clearly intended as a refutation.” Bacon's attack on Plato, however, is partially mediated through his critique of Christianity. Indeed, Bacon pays more explicit attention to the tropes and themes of revealed religion than he does to those of the story of the “old” Atlantis told in Plato's Timaeus and Critias. Scholars are divided as to the exact nature of Bacon's intentions in his treatment of religion in the New Atlantis. Richard Tuck suggests that “the desire for a reconstructed religion” is “explicit in the blend of Protestantism and Judaism” created by Bacon. Most scholars, however, unlike Tuck, argue that Bacon was more interested in undermining religion—or more specifically, its political authority—than in reconstructing it. Laurence Lampert's argument that Bacon stands at the head of “the actual holy war fought in Europe . . ., the warfare of science against religion that tamed sovereign religion” typifies much of the scholarly commentary on the New Atlantis since White's reading of it almost forty years ago. The consensus view is that Bacon promotes the politic manipulation of the tropes and themes of revealed religion so that they might be made to support the modern scientific project and the cause of peace from religious strife: “Bacon's lifelong concern for religion uniformly expressed itself in arguments for moderation in religion.” White argues that Bacon demonstrates how “religious turmoil” can be countered “not only by religious toleration, but also by religious eclecticism, amounting to religious universality.”

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The importance of cities becomes ever greater not only for the modification of the landscape, but also for the distribution of social classes. Poets, philosophers and artists have imagined ideal cities that could satisfy the need for a good quality of life for citizens.</p><p> Since the most ancient civilizations poets and philosophers have imagined ideal cities, with road plots corresponding to the various social classes. In the final text I will describe some examples of ideal cities presented by Homer, especially in the description of the shield of Achilles, from Plato in the description of his Atlantis, etc.</p><p> Atlantis (Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, "island of Atlas") is a fictional island mentioned in Plato's works <i>Timaeus</i> and <i>Critias</i>, where Plato represents the ideal state imagined in <i>The Republic</i>.</p><p> The city depicted in the Homeric shield of Achilles, as an ideal form, centred and circular, competes with the other city scheme based on an orthogonal plan and linear structures. The form of the Homeric city has exerted a paradigmatic function for other cities in Greece and Rome.</p><p> Among the best known images of ideal cities I will consider the <i>Città del Sole</i> (<i>City of the Sun</i>) by Tommaso Campanella and Utopia by Thomas More.</p><p> There are many books of collection of paintings of cities (G Braun and F Hogenberg, 1966).The most complete and interesting is that of Caspar van Wittel or Gaspar van Wittel (1652 or 1653, Amersfoort – September 13, 1736, Rome). He was a Dutch painter who played a remarkable role in the development of the <i>veduta</i>. He is credited with turning city topography into a painterly specialism in Italian art (G Briganti, 1996).</p><p> A rich collection of maps of Rome in the books by Amato Pietro Frutaz.</p><p> The city "liquid dimension" represents the complexities and contradictions of civic communities increasingly characterized by fragmentation and social unease.</p>

Great earthquakes and tsunami can have a tremendous societal impact. The Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755 caused tens of thousands of deaths in Portugal, Spain and NW Morocco. Felt as far as Hamburg and the Azores islands, its magnitude is estimated to be 8.5–9. However, because of the complex tectonics in Southern Iberia, the fault that produced the earthquake has not yet been clearly identified. Recently acquired data from the Gulf of Cadiz area (tomography, seismic profiles, high-resolution bathymetry, sampled active mud volcanoes) provide strong evidence for an active east dipping subduction zone beneath Gibraltar. Eleven out of 12 of the strongest earthquakes (M>8.5) of the past 100 years occurred along subduction zone megathrusts (including the December 2004 and March 2005 Sumatra earthquakes). Thus, it appears likely that the 1755 earthquake and tsunami were generated in a similar fashion, along the shallow east-dipping subduction fault plane. This implies that the Cadiz subduction zone is locked (like the Cascadia and Nankai/Japan subduction zones), with great earthquakes occurring over long return periods. Indeed, the regional paleoseismic record (contained in deep-water turbidites and shallow lagoon deposits) suggests great earthquakes off South West Iberia every 1500–2000 years. Tsunami deposits indicate an earlier great earthquake struck SW Iberia around 200 BC, as noted by Roman records from Cadiz. A written record of even older events may also exist. According to Plato's dialogues The Critias and The Timaeus, Atlantis was destroyed by ‘strong earthquakes and floods … in a single day and night’ at a date given as 11,600 BP. A 1 m thick turbidite deposit, containing coarse grained sediments from underwater avalanches, has been dated at 12,000 BP and may correspond to the destructive earthquake and tsunami described by Plato. The effects on a paleo-island (Spartel) in the straits of Gibraltar would have been devastating, if inhabited, and may have formed the basis for the Atlantis legend.

Plato, who lived in the 4th century B.C., wrote the dialogue Timaeos and Critias when he was 52 years old. In this he describes a catastrophe in Athens from an earthquake in the presence of excessive rain. He also describes several details, not visible in his century, in the Acropolis of Athens. These details are a spring and architectural details of buildings in which the warriors used to live. In Critias he mentions that the destruction of the spring was caused by an earthquake. The time of the catastrophe of Atlantis was not defined by him but it is implied that it occurred after the assault of the Atlantes in the Mediterranean. Archaeological excavations confirmed the existence of the spring which was about 25 m deep with respect to the present day walking level. Archaeologically dated ceramics, found at its bottom, denote the last function of the spring was in very early 12th century B.C. Plato describes the warriors’ settlements which were found outside of the fortification wall in the North East of the Acropolis. The philosopher, who was not a historian, describes a general catastrophe in Greece from which the Greek language survived till his century. Archaeological studies have offered a variety of tablets of Linear B writings which turn out to be the non-alphabetic type of writing of the Greeks up to the 12th century B.C. before the dark ages commence. Modern geoarchaeological and palaeoseismological studies prove that seismic storms occurred in the East Mediterranean between 1225 and 1175 B.C. The result of a fifty-year period of earthquakes was the catastrophe of many late Bronze Age palaces or settlements. For some analysts both Athens and Atlantis presented in Timaeos and Critias are imaginary entities. They maintained that the imaginary conflict between Athens and Atlantis served Plato to produce the first world’s “science fiction” and gave the Athenians an anti-imperialistic lesson through his fabricated myth. However, a part of this “science fiction”, Athens of Critias, is proved a reality of the 12th century B.C., described only by Plato and not by historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides and others. Analysts of the past have mixed Plato’s fabricated Athens presented in his dialogue Republic with the non-fabricated Athens of his dialogue Critias. This serious error has deflected researchers from their target to interpret Plato’s text efficiently.

The problem of the interpretation of the Timaeus represents one of the greatest exegetical challenges for Plotinus. For Plotinus the Timaeus is a problematic dialogue due to its mythical-allegorical language and the fact that some doctrines in the work seem incompatible with his hypostatic vision. The Plotinian conception of the demiurge is critical of the concept of “artisanal causality.” Plotinus does not agree that the cosmos could have been generated according to a plan, i.e., according to dianoetic and contingent reasoning. At the same time, he identifies the demiurge with the Intellect, but then, in other treatises, also equates the demiurge with the world soul and nature, i.e., the aspect of the third hypostasis that has the task of acting directly on matter. While this ambiguity of Plotinus is found in several places of his Enneads, it finds justification in a spurious dialogue of Plato, the Epinomis, in which the role of the demiurgic soul is central. In my opinion, Plotinus is likely to have taken his cue from the Epinomis as an endorsement for his doctrine of the demiurgic soul. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the identification of the demiurgic soul with a single hypostasis leads Plotinus to several aporias.

It is easier to criticize others and their foreign way of life, than to turn the mirror of critical reflection upon one’s own customs and laws. I argue that Plato follows this basic premise in the Timaeus when he constructs a story about Atlantis, which Solon, the Athenian, learns during his travels to Egypt. The reason why Plato appeals to the distinction that his Greek audience makes between themselves and the ξένοι is pedagogical. On the example of the conflict between Atlantis—a mythical and, therefore, a foreign polis— and ancient Athens, Plato seeks to remind the Greeks what even a mighty polis stands to lose if it pursues expansionist war. On the example of the failure that befalls the mythical Atlantis, and on the basis of the religious similarity between ancient Athens and ancient Sais (21e), Plato bridges the distance between the Greeks and the Egyptians, who would have been seen as actual (as opposed to mythical) ξένοι. The next step that Plato encourages his contemporaries to take is this: look at the history of Egypt (8 – 7BC) and the internal conflicts that led to the demise of the last bastion of Egyptian power—Sais—and recognize in the internal political intrigues of the “Athens-loving” (21e) ξένοι the pattern of the destructive actions of the Greeks. Plato moves from the less to the more familiar—from the story about a mythic past and Atlantis, to ancient Athenians, to ancient Egyptians, to the Egyptians and Athenians of Solon’s time. The meeting between the ξένοι—the Egyptians at Sais—and the quintessentially Athenian Greek, Solon (7BC – 6BC), undeniably problematizes the customs, national identity, and political dealings of Plato’s contemporaries, the Greeks in the 5BC – 4BC.
 By the time that Plato writes the Timaeus, circa 360BC, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Athens is all but undone. However, the fate of Greece is not yet sealed. Why turn to Egypt? Toby Wilkinson’s (2013) description of the Egyptian kingdom offers a clue: “The monarchy had sunk to an all-time low. Devoid of respect and stripped of mystique, it was but a pale imitation of past pharaonic glories” (The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt 431). The Greeks face that same prospect, but how to make them see? Direct criticism (the Philippic addresses of Demosthenes, for example) fails. Plato devises a decoy—make Greeks reflect on the repercussions of their poor political decisions by seeing them reflected in the actions and the history of the Egyptians—the Greek-loving and, by Plato’s time, defeated ξένοι.

Following strictly Plato’s information we reach Iberia and there we discovered the basic geomorphological characteristics of a horseshow shape flat and elongated basin which is surrounded by mountains. The basin reaches the Atlantic Ocean. This valley is Andalusia and it was missed by Herodotus and Hecateus, who lived a century earlier than Plato, and constructed North West Europe’s map. The Iberian civilization is reflected in the Greek myths prior to Plato too. Atlantis’ catastrophe in the shape of the concentric scheme’s, being in Iberia’s coast, was realized by earthquakes and a tsunami. The discovery of the very first Mycenaean vase’s fragment, in Guadalquivir’s estuary by Spanish archaeologists in 1990, offered the first archaeological evidence that the prehistoric Greeks had visited Atlantis after all before the 12th century B.C. The recent interest of the Spanish Archaeological Survey in Andalusia initiated because it has been proved geologically that the region had not been submerged since the last ice age. New evidence suggests that the waters may have receded in time for the Iberians in the period Tartesssos to build an urban centre, which was later destroyed by earthquakes and a tsunami as Plato describes in Timaeos and Critias for this region. Although platonic Atlantis could not be considered, as Thucydides would prefer, a historical text but it cannot be considered as a single paramyth either since some parts of his text have been proved already. It can be considered as a genuine myth containing a true prehistoric kernel covered firstly by a layer of inventions produced by transmitting people, the story, from generation to generation between the actual occurrence of the event within the 12th century B.C. and Solon’s 6th century B.C. who recorded it and then of the 4th century B.C. when Plato wrote down. Atlantis is also covered by a platonic paramythical layer full of mathematics and musicological information which is recognized and can be removed liberating the genuine myth’s kernel from the platonic intervention.

The story of Atlantis has been made up by the philosopher Plato for his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, but there is still discussion about the internal function of this myth and about Plato’s sources of inspiration. The story of Atlantis was apparently not very popular in antiquity, and only 29 Greek and Latin authors allude to it, some of them looking for an allegorical interpre tation, others taking Plato literally. Most of them refer directly to Plato’s story, and only occa sionally some new elements have been created about the continent. The discovery of America confirmed the conviction that Atlantis once really existed and many theories about the location of Atlantis have been suggested since. The Atlantis theme was also very popular in literature, films and comics of the 19th-20th century AD, creating a never ending flow of new interpreta tions and additional stories.

This essay offers a theoretical analysis of Plato’s Atlantis. It opens with a close reading of Atlantis based on excerpts from Plato’s account of the island-continent and its city-state detailed in the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias (360 BCE). Further on, it explores the manner in which Plato portrays Atlantis as a heterotopian chronotope so as to develop a speculative theoretical profile and analysis for the mytho-historical island state, testing the Isle as a theoretical space in relation to issues and debates concerning Other spaces, that is, heterotopia and utopia. The methodology in this paper will be to compare and contrast the Platonic Atlantian narrative against two possible models of interpretation; namely, Michel Foucault’s comparison of the relationship between utopia and various types of heterotopias in “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1984), and Frederic Jameson’s analysis of the tensions between space, time, and utopia in Archaeology of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005).

The first two sections of this essay are devoted to the activity of memory in the foundation of political community through the examples of the myth of Athenian autochthony, on the basis of Enrico Montanari&rsquo;s work <em>Il mito dell&rsquo;autoctonia</em>, and Plato&rsquo;s political project in the dialogues <em>Republic</em>, <em>Timaeus</em> and <em>Critias</em>, through the concept of <em>katabasis</em> and opposition between land and sea, i.e. Athens and Atlantis. In the last section, I raise the question about the speculative substance of memory by the relation between condition and conditioned, in the context of the &laquo;Positing reflection&raquo; in the <em>Doctrine of essence</em> of Hegel&rsquo;s <em>Science of Logic</em>, and through the action of Mnemosyne in relation with Fanes and Chronos in Orphic tradition, to come to face the subject of nostalgia for zoe, indestructible life of Dionysus, as the basis of human community.

In a dialogue of Plato, a text that has generated many imaginative approaches and detaching from those, I identify numerous elements specific to the Proto-Indo-European culture, which allow me to formulate the hypothesis that the subject in question is represented by the ancient civilization itself. Based on this assumption, I discover a lot of new information that needs to be studied and especially about what we now call Homeland. Even if the text is so far from the scientific rigor of today, the relevant cultural elements that are included, point to a much earlier discovery - 360 B.C. of three social functions, for example, or confirm many others contemporary discoveries about the ancient civilization.

In Idea and Reality in Plato's Timaeus (Idee und Wirklichkeit in Platos Timaios) Gadamer criticised the neoplatonist interpretation of Plato's cosmogony, which posited the universe's emanation from “The One'' in a hierarchical manner. Contrary to this, by interpreting Timaeus according to overall text analysis of Plato's dialectics, Gadamer argued that the universe came from the logos' efforts in organising various unordered materials to become more mathematically ordered. The purpose of this research was to critically evaluate his hermeneutical stance. A conceptual analysis has been conducted through an extensive and rigorous literature review to fulfill the research objectives. The result indicated that there was an inconsistency between Gadamer’s interpretation of Timaeus and his hermeneutical thesis in his masterpiece Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). He interpreted Timaeus textually as if he had undermined his own philosophical hermeneutics framework, focusing on the pre-structure of understanding that contained prejudice and authority. This research will give a new perspective in reconsidering the complexities of interpretation itself and enrich ongoing dialogues both within the discourse on Plato's dialogues and Gadamer's own hermeneutical framework.

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the nature of true philosophers is described in Plato’s Timaeus. By examining the distinction between two kinds of opinion – one (produced by sensation) absolutely false, the other (developed through one of the soul’s rational faculties) reliably true – I will try to show that Plato coined a new term to denote both true philosophers and the characteristics of their knowledge. From being a ‘love of wisdom’, true philosophy came to be defined as a ‘passion for science’. Finally, I will try to illustrate the protreptic intent underlying this choice of words and how it concerns the main critical target of the Timaeus, the so-called Presocratics.

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the nature of true philosophers is described in Plato's Timaeus. By examining the distinction between two kinds of opinion – one (produced by sensation) absolutely false, the other (developed through one of the soul's rational faculties) reliably true – I will try to show that Plato coined a new term to denote both true philosophers and the characteristics of their knowledge. From being a 'love of wisdom', true philosophy came to be defined as a 'passion for science'. Finally, I will try to illustrate the protreptic intent underlying this choice of words and how it concerns the main critical target of the Timaeus, the so-called Presocratics.

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 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The article is dedicated to the problem of comparative study of the hermeneutics principles in religious-philosophical and literary-critical discourse of Vladimir Solovyov and Vyacheslav Ivanov. It is shown that Plato’s dialogue traditions in the works of Ivanov were intellectual reflections and expressed “Plato’s turn” in hermeneutical tradition of text interpretation that outlined in Russian religious philosophy. Special comparative study of this problem had not been conducted. It is proved that Ivanov’s interest to Plato’s dialogues derived from various sources. Solovyov’s works and translations of Plato’s works in Russia played a major role in it. Solovyov was a translator and commentator of Socratic dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher. His introductory chapters made for Plato’s dialogue translations, his literary and philosophical criticism are considered in the article. Materials form Ivanov’s personal archive are analyzed and they show that he was interested in Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus”, “Phaedrus” and others. His articles, lectures, under-investigated materials and the books “Dionysus and Pre-Dionysianism” (1923) and “Dostoevsky. Tragedy-Myth-Mysticism” (1932) are considered. A.F. Losev’s works on ancient philosophy and his research on Solovyov and works of F. Schleiermache, H.G. Gadamer and became the object of the comparative analysis. It is shown that Plato’s dialectics and dialogues became major source for development of philosophical hermeneutics principles for Solovyov, Ivanov and Losev. It is shown that a myth in Solovyov’s, Ivanov’s and Losev’s works as well as in Plato’s dialogues becomes a category of thinking, a way of religious-philosophical perception, a form of artistic representation of the image-symbol and a basis of hermeneutical dialectic understanding. Solovyov and Ivanov’s view on Plato and Platonism is important for studying the development of hermeneutic ideas in Russian philosophy and literature studies.

После выхода в свет монументальной работы Тэйлора «Комментарий на ‘Тимей’ Платона» (Taylor [1928]), мысль о том, что Эмпедокл оказал большое влияние на формирование некоторых идей о строении космоса, стала популярной во многих исследованиях последующих лет. Серьезный отпор эта мысль получила в статье Хершбелла «Влияние Эмпедокла на ‘Тимей’» (Hershbell [1974]), где автор последовательно разбирает все попытки связать Эмпедокла с Платоном, отбрасывает их как неубедительные и соглашается признать влияние со стороны Эмпедокла только в области физиологии, а именно на учение Платона об устройстве человеческого тела (ногтях и волосах). Основной аргумент Хершбелла состоит в том, что нигде в «Тимее» мы не находим прямого заимствования Эмпедокловых терминов, тогда как очевидная созвучность идей слишком поверхностна и может быть общим местом (Hershbell [1974], p. 151). Попытка устроиться где-то между восторженным Тэйлором и критичным Хершбеллом меня не устраивает. Поэтому в этой статье я предпринимаю попытку рассмотреть вопрос о связи Эмпедокла с Платоном несколько иначе. В первую очередь, я намерена проанализировать все упоминания об Эмпедокле и его учении в разных диалогах, и, во-вторых, обратить внимание на некоторые, имеющие явный технический подтекст, слова, которые встречаются и у Эмпедокла, и у Платона. The article deals with a controversial question about possible Empedoclean influence on Plato’s Timaeus. I consider two opposite views on this problem: the position of Taylor and the critical attitude of Hershbell. First, I consider all references on Empedocles and his teaching in Plato’s dialogs; secondly, I give attention to several words that have clear technical background, which we can find both in Empedocles and in Plato. Finally, I intend to show that Empedocles affected some aspects of Plato’s physiology and cosmology, the most interesting parallel being a similarity of the images of Platonic Demiurge and Empedoclean Aphrodite.