Sarah Broadie

(1941 - 2021)

The Receptacle of the title is, of course, the ‘Receptacle of all becoming’ in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato likens it to a ‘nurse’, and even calls it a ‘mother’. He speaks of it as that in which its contents come to be, only in their turn to disappear from it. He compares it to a mass of gold which someone incessantly remoulds into different shape. He declares it completely unchanging: ‘it does not depart from its own character in any way'. What is its character? It is the character of possessing and acquiring no character similar to that of any of the objects said to enter it and disappear from it. Plato says too that it is space; the receptacle is what makes it true that each of those objects is somewhere. And finally, as if he had not already given us far too much to digest of this very rich subject, Plato adds that the Receptacle shakes its contents with a sort of winnowing motion, and in fact was already doing this even before the craftsman god had formed this world of ours. The question of this paper is: what is the function of this multifariously conceived entity, or principle, the Receptacle? I shall approach by asking what its contents are.

THIS PAPER is concerned with an ancient rebuttal of determinism, possibly the oldest in our Western tradition. It runs as follows: if whatever happens happens of necessity, there is no point at all in deliberating; but the consequent is intolerable, so the antecedent must be rejected. This objection is put forward by Aristotle, and it reappears in elaborated forms in later works of antiquity. But for the most part, philosophers on both sides of the determinist debate have remained unimpressed by the argument. Determinists from early times have rejected it as fallacious, and their opinion is usually shared these days even by opponents of determinism. Here this negative verdict will be contested. It will be maintained in what follows that the Aristotelian objection expresses an important truth, namely that determinism is an absurd position for anyone not prepared to abandon the ordinary assumption that human beings have often good reason to deliberate. The absurdity will be shown to stem from a distinctive feature of the conditional judgments used in practical reasoning.

Plato's Timaeus is one of the most influential and challenging works of ancient philosophy to have come down to us. Sarah Broadie's rich and compelling study proposes new interpretations of major elements of the Timaeus, including the separate Demiurge, the cosmic 'beginning', the 'second mixing', the Receptacle and the Atlantis story. Broadie shows how Plato deploys the mythic themes of the Timaeus to convey fundamental philosophical insights and examines the profoundly differing methods of interpretation which have been brought to bear on the work. Her book is for everyone interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, cosmology and mythology, whether classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas or historians of science. It offers new findings to scholars familiar with the material, but it is also a clear and reliable resource for anyone coming to it for the first time.

Abstract We act so as to make things better than they would have been but for the action; we are horrified by an uncontrollable catastrophe because it made things so much worse than they would have been without it. Such attitudes are reasonable only if it is reasonable to make the associated counterfactual conditional judgments. But making such judgments cannot be reasonable if one holds both (1) that this world is absolutely and uniquely actual (?absolute actualism?), and (2) that everything is settled (?ES?). Determinism (strictly understood) figures as the most obvious example of ES theory, but ES can occur in an indeterministic form too: both forms are considered

There are various motives for refining the notion of cause. Aristotle's was an interest in providing the most informative and illuminating method of explaining the central natural phenomena of his universe. A different sort of motive is created by problems of free will and responsibility, of which readers may have been reminded by the reference to indeterminism. The thought that our free and responsible behaviour is caused by factors over which we have no control has often seemed impossible to accept and impossible to reject. The challenge then is to refine the notion of cause either so that the thought becomes more acceptable or so that it becomes more rejectable.

In this incisive study Sarah Broadie gives an argued account of the main topics of Aristotle's ethics: eudaimonia, virtue, voluntary agency, practical reason, akrasia, pleasure, and the ethical status of theoria. She explores the sense of "eudaimonia," probes Aristotle's division of the soul and its virtues, and traces the ambiguities in "voluntary." Fresh light is shed on his comparison of practical wisdom with other kinds of knowledge, and a realistic account is developed of Aristototelian deliberation. The concept of pleasure as value-judgment is expounded, and the problem of akrasia is argued to be less of a problem to Aristotle than to his modern interpreters. Showing that the theoretic ideal of Nicomachean Ethics X is in step with the earlier emphasis on practice, as well as with the doctrine of the Eudemian Ethics, this work makes a major contribution towards the understanding of Aristotle's ethics.