Plato seems to have taken the concept of appropriateness, as expressed by the two word-families to prepon and to prosekon, to be of considerable value in cosmological speculation, judging from a number of passages in the Timaeus. The same language was used by Xenophanes and possibly by Anaximander . A fresh examination of these words in their contexts shows that the accounts of prepein and prosekein in Liddell, Scott, and Jones' Greek-English Lexicon are incomplete. An epistemic interpretation o…
Read morePlato seems to have taken the concept of appropriateness, as expressed by the two word-families to prepon and to prosekon, to be of considerable value in cosmological speculation, judging from a number of passages in the Timaeus. The same language was used by Xenophanes and possibly by Anaximander . A fresh examination of these words in their contexts shows that the accounts of prepein and prosekein in Liddell, Scott, and Jones' Greek-English Lexicon are incomplete. An epistemic interpretation of these verbs, when they are used impersonally, e.g. "it makes sense," "it is plausible," "it stands to reason," or "it is likely," is sometimes an important aspect of their composite sense and sometimes makes better sense of the text than does its main rivals. Those rivals are a moral one, on one hand, e.g. "it is right," "it is necessary," or "it is obligatory," and a generally normative or "quasi-moral" one, on the other, e.g. "it is fitting," "it is suitable," or "it is appropriate." ;In chapter one I present a case against the adequacy of moral or quasi-moral interpretations of this language in a sample of cosmological texts in the Timaeus. Chapter two illustrates, from a number of passages in non-Platonic authors, that the epistemic sense of this language was available to Plato. Chapter three shows that Plato himself used this language epistemically in a number of texts other than the Timaeus. In chapter four I make use of the results of chapters two and three to illuminate Plato's meaning in Timaeus 29b, and 29d, regarding methodological discourse; 38a, 38b, 48b, 50d, and 62d, regarding meta-cosmological discourse; and 33b, 35b, 51a, 52c, 54c, and 55d, regarding cosmological discourse. I conclude this chapter with an estimate of how this study affects our overall interpretation of the Timaeus. In chapter five I argue that since Plato stands in a tradition of using language of this kind in this way to speculate in matters strictly speaking beyond verification, there is good reason to interpret both Xenophanes B26 and Anaximander A26 epistemically as well