Aspekte der Platonischen Kosmologie (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 457 the religious tenets anything that could have a discouraging effect--such as the perennial return of Strife and Hatred for another ten thousand years or that there will not be any individual postexistence in the Sphairos--is meticulously passed over in silence. The last chapter, superscribed "Poetry," is meant to decide the ancient question, Is Empedocles a real poet? For the author, he is. And to substantiate this conviction, the whole chapter is supposed to demonstrate, almost in the manner of checking the entries in a bank account, that in the balance the verses of Empedocles are genuine poetry. In contrast, Aristotle in a vitriolic remark quipped that the only feature common to Empedocles and Homer was the metre. Anyway, a decision here, I think, is a matter of feeling and empathy rather than of computation. And so, having solved the arduous problem of digging out the real meaning by translating those verses into sober, philosophical language, I venture to say that, for all their poetical make-up, with its sometimes bold and even brilliant, sometimes merely bombastic pictures and metaphors, the philosophical poems of Empedocles are not poetry, but versification. There is still that "prefatory essay" (which, by the way, more fittingly could have been an appendix), lts title is, "Empedocles and T. S. Eliot." The writer of the essay, Marshall McLuhan, says on page viii that, "after having studied Eliot for decades," he has been "only recently introduced to Empedocles by Dr. Lambridis," .the author of the new book. A reader, therefore, who is interested in Empedocles might not expect to learn here very much about the ancient philosopher. But whoever takes interest in Eliot and other English poets of today, will find that, indeed, due to that introduction, the writer's understanding "of the work of Eliot and his contemporaries has been changed and deepened"--a find that might perhaps appear to be of more interest to the writer himself than to the reader. I cannot help mentioning, finally, a very annoyingfeature of the book. It is teeming with misprints , some of them even embarrassing, as, for instance, "Historicum Graecum" instead of "Historicorum Graecorum" (p. xvi). And on one page (14), even whole lines are so jumbled up that a jigsaw puzzle training is needed for putting them in place. The book seems not to have been proofread at all. FELix M. O.EVE New Schoolfor Social Research Wolfgang Scheffel. Aspekte der Platonischen Kosmologie. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Pp. xvi + 146. 48 gld. This monograph, Volume 24 in the series Philosophia Antiqua, concerns primarily the question of whether Plato's myth of creation as set forth in the Timaeus is to be taken literally, that is, as an account of a (unique) actual occurrence, or is it rather to be analyzed as some sort of expedient literary device. Since the author believes very strongly that Plato clearly postulates a real creation of the cosmos by the Demiurge, much space is devoted to solving the principal problems of textual interpretation that arise from such a view. Indeed, it is the apparent insolubilityof certain of these problems that has been the motivation for adopting the "literary device" interpretation on the part of so many modern commentators. Scheffel begins by distinguishing between the clashing positions concerning the interpretation of the Timaeus taken by Xenocrates (Plato's second successor as head of the Academy in 339 B.c.) and Aristotle himself. Under the banner of the nonliteralists, including Xenocrates, for whom Plato's creation myth is not to be taken literally, Scheffel includes such names as A. E. Taylor (in his 1928 Commentary) and Eduard Zeller (in his four-volume history) as well as G. S. Claghorn, H. F. Cherniss, and F. M. Cornford. Opposing this impressive array and in the minority as far as modern interpretations go (despite the authority of Aristotle) Scheffel 458 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY places R. Hackforth and G. Vlastos. ' Scheffel loosely aligns himself with this latter general position. He deviates from or goes beyond Hackforth in that he believes he has found a way to avoid postulating a precosmic absence of soul (an absence that would appear to contradict the doctrine of...