God and Forms in Plato by Richard D. Mohr (PDF)

Description

This book is a collection of dovetailing essays which together interpret and assess the chief arguments and texts which make up Plato’s cosmology. Arguments in the Timaeus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, and Laws X are analyzed with an eye to problems which affect the wider understanding of Plato’s metaphysics, theology, epistemology, psychology, and physics. New interpretations are given to Plato’s views on the role and characteristics of his craftsman God, the nature and status of Forms, the nature of time and eternity, the status and nature of space and the phenomenal realm, and the nature of and relations between reason, souls, bodies, and motion. The book is critically sympathetic to the Platonic project, at least to the extent that it argues that many (though not all) features of the Platonic cosmology are more intelligible and coherent than usually supposed by critics. It defends the view that for Plato God makes the world in the way that a carpenter cuts a board to be exactly a yard long – by applying a yard stick to the board and removing the excess wood. independently both of the agent who creates and the world on which he works. These standards are Plato’s Forms. Transcendent Forms cannot be excised from the Platonic metaphysics as many modern critics have been trying to do in an attempt to make Plato respectable by today’s criteria of philosophical decency. Parts of this work were previously published in 1985 by E. J. Brill (Leiden) under the title The Platonic Cosmology. This new edition includes four published essays by the author as well as one as of yet unpublished essay titled Extensions.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Richard D. Mohr is Professor of Philosophy and of the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a series of works on social issues — Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law (1988); Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (1992); A More Perfect Union (1994); Pottery, Politics, Art: George Ohr and the Brothers Kirkpatrick (2003); The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights (2005). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. FROM THE PREFACEThis is a book about how, for Plato, God makes the world. Unlike in the Catholic story about how God makes the world, God in this story does not make the world out of nothing. Indeed he doesn’t make the world out of anything — even though he is chiefly characterized as a craftsman or, more simply, maker. There is making and there is making. Plato’s God has not read the second book of Aristotle’s Physics and so does not know that one makes things by making them out of matter. On that view, one first finds some indeterminate stuff and then one imposes upon it a form, property, or shape where there was no form, property or shape before. Plato’s God does not work like a carver who whittles an amorphous chunk of driftwood into a cube, nor like an artisan who pours molten brass into a mold to make a bell, ball-bearing, or “Bird in Flight.” Neither does Plato’s craftsman God make the world out of discrete components by assemblage. He does not make things by taking bits which have determinate characters (forms, properties, shapes), but no order among them, and by putting them into an arrangement create order. He does not work like a tile setter making a mosaic mural out of tessera, nor like a child on Christmas morning making a Ferris Wheel out of an Erector® Set — “some assemblage required.”Plato’s craftsman God or Demiurge, as he sets out to create the heavens, is not confronted with either formless matter or determinate bits. Rather he has been reading the neglected Milesian philosophers, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and knows that the phenomenal realm which confronts him is a booming, buzzing confusion of instances of determinable properties, say, of temperature, speed, thickness, height, and compactness, which — the instances, that is — career along scales of increase and decrease, slide along gradients of more and less, become hotter and colder, faster and slower, stouter or svelter, higher and lower, denser and rarer, drier and wetter, louder and softer, and the like. He improves upon the confusion by introducing measures into it, by eliminating from it excesses and deficiencies as the instances slide along the various gradients. This sort of making involves three sorts of skill and expertise. First, the craftsman himself has to have the ability to shift the instances of properties along the scales upon which they, on their own, slide. He needs to be like a doctor who knows how to raise and lower the temperature of an alternatingly chilled and fevered patient. Second, he must be able to fix the instance at a certain degree on the scale, like the doctor who arrests and holds the patient’s temperature at a chosen degree. Finally, beyond these preliminary skills, the craftsman God needs to know what point on the scale of degrees is the right degree at which to fix the instance of the property. The good doctor needs to know that 98.6º F is the right degree at which to fix the patient’s temperature. When he fixes the instance at the degree on the scale dictated by the standard, he has done his job. The craftsman God, like the accomplished doctor, needs a standard or measure. Yet this standard is not something that can be discovered simply by examining the scale of degrees upon which an instance of a property slides. The standard is off the scale. It is something like a meter stick, a thermometer, or a template, something by reference to which we assess and identify other things. And so if the Demiurge is to improve the world, he needs to have access to objects that serve as standards and which are not part of the phenomenal realm. These standards and measures Plato calls Forms or Ideas. They provide content for God’s good intentions to craft. His good intentions and the world the way it is given to him are not sufficient for its improvement. Forms are essential to the nature of his craft.And Forms are essential for there being any phenomena in the first place. Before the creation of the measured world, the phenomena are fleeting non-substantial images, like shadows on walls, images on water, and reflections in mirrors. To exist such images must have two things. They must have a medium, on which they appear, but which does not enter into them. Plato calls this medium the receptacle of space. And they must have originals which determine both what the images are images of and which must persist if the images are to exist. Plato calls these originals Forms. Without Forms there are no phenomena. Both God and Forms have distinct roles in Plato’s metaphysics, roles that can not be reduced to elements of other philosophers’ metaphysics nor be explained away as metaphysical luxuries within his own system.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book is a revised and expanded editon of a 1985 book The Platonic Cosmology by the same author. As explained on p.ix of the preface to the 2005 edition, the author attempts to “place Plato’s cosmological commitments in the Timaeus, Statesman, and Philebus into a wider metaphysical context.” A sequence of highly imformative essays allows the author to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of Plato’s physics, psychology, epistemology, and theology. Unlike many Anglo-American critics of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, who chose to ignore the important aspects of late Platonism, the author takles issues relating to Time and Eternity, Space and Phenomenal World, Reason and God. The nature and characteristics of Plato’s Craftsman God (Timaeus 28a6,29a3,41a7, 42e8, 62e2, 69c3; Philebus 27b1) or Maker (Timaeus 28c3; Philebus 27a5)are discussed and explained not through the lens of Aristotle’s Physics II or Metaphysics XII but to put it in layman’s terms, as Plato would have explained it, if he were alive today. A well-documented and thoughtfully written book indeed!!!

Keywords

Free Download God and Forms in Plato in PDF format
God and Forms in Plato PDF Free Download
Download God and Forms in Plato 2005 PDF Free
God and Forms in Plato 2005 PDF Free Download
Download God and Forms in Plato PDF
Free Download Ebook God and Forms in Plato