Allan Silverman

Let me begin with some of the background worries that motivate the paper. First, for years I have been working on the relation of the Timaeus to the Republic guided by this triple analogy: as the demiurge is to the cosmos, so the philosopher-ruler is to the polis, so reason is to the soul or individual. The key claim is Tim. 29e: the demiurge is good and so wants to make everything it makes like it itself is, i.e., good, as good as possible. I take the demiurge to be reason idealized, so I infer reason wants to make everything it makes as good as possible. This sets the stage: how is reason related to the good?

Lloyd Gerson has a vision of what Platonism is. Those who see things differently may find his vision bewildering. In Platonism and Naturalism, to his credit, his vision is synoptic and impressively focused on critical passages and issues, especially in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, though ethics also receives much attention. Leaving aside the introduction and chapter 1, chapters 2–6 are devoted to Plato and comprise two-thirds of the work. Chapters 7, "Aristotle the Platonist," 8, "Plotinus the Platonist," and 9, "Proclus and Trouble in Paradise," along with brief concluding remarks, comprise the remainder. Naturally they take up only certain issues in the Platonism of these successors....

In this thesis I offer a reconstruction of some of the foundations of Plato's Theory of Knowledge. This effort is based upon two Platonic theses: Thought is Language and The objects of different faculties of the soul are distinct. The thesis is an investigation of the inter-relation of these two claims. I argue that the former does not prompt Plato to abandon the latter, the so-called Two Worlds hypothesis of the Republic, but rather serves as a justification of that hypothesis. In the first chapter I discuss Plato's philosophy of language. The vehicle for this is the Cratylus. Through a careful reading of the entire dialogue I present a new interpretation of the three naming-relations of the work, namely Natural Names, Conventional Like Names and Conventional Unlike Names. One element of this view is that the Cratylus' theory of names is in accord with the remarks of the Phaedo about the different ways in which Forms and participants bear the same name. ;The concern of the second chapter is Plato's Ontology. Although my focus is on the nature of the various beings that serve as the objects of the psychological attitudes, the aim of the chapter is to show how the three kinds of names discovered in the Cratylus can be mapped onto the three kinds of beings of Plato's Ontology, Forms, form-copies and material particulars such as Socrates. This results in a new interpretation of the relation between a Form and its essence, a new way to look at the Aristotelian Third Man argument and a new understanding of the separation of the Forms. I base my argument on the Phaedo, Republic and especially Parmenides. ;In chapter three I turn to the nature of the soul as thinker. In the first half of the chapter I concentrate on Plato's Theory of Aisthesis. I argue that it is not a faculty of the same part of the soul as knowledge and belief. In the second section I show how Plato's conception of the soul and his Ontology combine to allow language to serve as the vehicle for all the activities of the rational soul without violating the two worlds hypothesis. In the conclusion I offer a myth of the language-learner to bring out the interrelation of Psychology, Ontology and Language. The myth illustrates the various stages in the development of mind, shows how most of humankind comes to the stage of belief and suggests why they do not progress beyond belief to knowledge

This short comment on Professor Sauvé Meyer’s paper attempts to draw attention to two issues that influence our understanding of Divine responsibility in the Timaeus. The first concerns the question of the literalness of the argument. If there is no creation, per much of the ancient tradition of commentators on the Timaeus, then there can be no divine responsibility. The second is the Timaeus’ account of the origin of non-human animals. Since they come from ‘fallen humans,’ and since they are necessary in order for the Demiurgic creation to be complete or perfect, in some sense they, and the fall of humans, must be part of the divine plan.

Plato's Individuals is rich and rewarding. McCabe's reading will compel us to examine anew the presuppositions we bring to the enterprise of understanding Plato. Her devotion to showing that her thesis is found almost everywhere in the corpus is noteworthy. At times she also seems to strain to assimilate modern and Platonic concerns. If one can accept that Plato's tripartite soul goes over into something we might recognize as the problem of personal identity, it can only be because we are writing off his devotion to reincarnation and transmigration. It is, however, McCabe's novel and energetic defense of individuation that deserves closest scrutiny. Here charges of anachronism and projection will be heard.