Where’s Number Four?: The Place of Structure in Plato’s Timaeus

Through a detailed reading of the Timaeus, I show that the concept of structure plays an implicitly central but untheorized role in Plato’s philosophy. Plato holds apart form and matter, while theorizing the participation of particulars in universal ideas. I argue that “structure” is the concept necessary to understand the doctrine of participation, and that it mediates between the ideal and the material, the formal and the physical, in Platonic theory. This argument is developed through an engagement with the theory of the so-called Platonic solids in the Timaeus: Plato’s account of the geometrical structure of the elements. The chapter concludes by positioning this theory of structure in relation to Badiou’s “Mark and Lack” and Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry.

Enthusiasm and Platonic furor in the Origins of Cartesian Science: The Olympian Dreams

In the Olympica, the lost manuscript wherein Descartes described his famous three dreams, he wrote that on the night of Saint Martin in 1619 he felt asleep in a state of enthusiasm. He interpreted the dreams that ensued as the divine revelation of the principles of a new and admirable science. I here propose that the Olympica were a literary fiction devised by Descartes to legitimize his arrival on the philosophical scene by proposing the principles of a new science. The function of dreams as the best way to reach true wisdom is in line with a long philosophical tradition. This paper offers an attempt to understand the Cartesian enthusiasm in its context, that is, before the criticism of enthusiasm as something incompatible with reason became widespread and when it was still linked to the Platonic theory of furor – poetic and divine – the state that allows the subject access to the truth.

Eἶδος, ἰδέα, παράδειγμα: osservazioni sulla natura del Santo in Eutifrone 6d–10e

Plato’s Euthyphro has been interpreted in two ways. The first one, given by Vlastos, is the so-called “developmentalism” according to which in the Euthyphro (and in the early dialogues) we cannot find any ‘theory of Forms’, which belongs only to Plato’s middle dialogues, but nothing more than a search for definitions. The second one, supported by Allen, claims instead that in the Euthyphro we can find the early (or Socratic) theory of Forms, a theory that has some common items as well as some differences with the later (or Platonic) theory of Forms. Through the detailed analysis of the refutation of Euthyphro second definition of holiness I argue that the ontological status of Holiness and its causal role is already the status and the role played by the Forms in Plato’s middle works. So a metaphysical meaning can be assigned to εἶδος, ἰδέα, παράδειγμα already in the Euthyphro.

Plato’s Ethics

This chapter discusses Plato’s ethics. Plato’s ethical thinking is found throughout the dialogues, from those in which Socrates shows other people that they fail to understand the claims they make about courage, friendship, or virtue to those in which he, or another person, gives long, sometimes uninterrupted speeches on a variety of topics. Ethics is treated sometimes on its own, sometimes in political contexts, and sometimes in a framework of metaphysical theorizing. Thus, when examining Plato’s ethical arguments, it is important to pay attention to their role in the dialogue in which they occur. Nonetheless, it is legitimate to extract ethics, as a subject, from the dialogues and to outline a Platonic theory of it. Differing as they do between dialogues, his discussions of ethical concerns do fall into patterns which can be brought together and seen to have a distinctive structure. The chapter first looks at his theoretical answer to the question about virtue and happiness. It then examines the way he discusses virtue, followed by an exploration of his positions on pleasure. It concludes by looking at the relation of Plato’s ethics to his political and his metaphysical thought.