Plato's Universe (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 99 harmonized and irradiated by Goodness is surely a religious rather than a rationally explicable truth" (p. 512). Now, if psyche is fundamentally nous, one cannot help but wonder at the efficacy of the power of reason, especially when, in the face of ultimate problems in the higher dialectic, it resorts to the religious way of truth and mythical thought. In his next volume, which will discuss the post-Republic dialogues, these problems will doubtlessly receive further attention. The fact remains that the sound scholarship and comprehensive discussions Guthrie offers in the present volume make it a most valuable and indispensableaid to the study of the history of ancient philosophy, and of Plato in particular. JOHN P. ANTON Emory University Plato's Universe. By Gregory Vlastos. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Pp. xiii + 130. $3.95) Since the late thirties Gregory Vlastos has been preoccupied with the major problems of Timaeus interpretation.1Over the same period of time, he has been equally concerned with difficulties in understanding the pre-Platonic physiologoi. 2In recent years he has focused on the development of ancient Greek astronomy. All three of these preoccupations come together in his Danz lectures at the University of Washington, delivered in 1972 in Seattle and now published in this volume. It is a magisterial little book, drawing upon and exhibiting Vlastos's superb scholarship in these areas and presenting the fruits of that scholarship with great simplicity and freshness. It will be equally at home in undergraduate classrooms and scholars' studies. The major thesis of the book is stated in the introduction: Though it was not givento them [i.e., the early Greekphysiologoi]--nor, for that matter, to Plato or to Aristotle after them--to grasp the essential genius of the scientific method, they did discover something else which may still be reckoned one of the triumphs of the rational imagination: the conception of the cosmos that ispresupposed by the idea of natural scienceand its practice. (P. xii) In a chapter on the physiologoi, Vlastos credits them, first, with so filling the universe (ouranos) with matter as to leave no arena for the operations of the gods and, second, with producing a variety of doctrines of nature (physis). Whether the latter are doctrines of beginningsor of invariant features, Vlastos does not credit their authors with the development of any proper science. What they are credited with is the development of conceptions of kosmos as intelligible ordered arrangement (with appropriate aesthetic and moral overtones) that accomplished "the demolition of the supernatural.., without a single word about the victim" (p. 20). Vlastos is particularly impressed with the cosmic conception of Heraclitus: uncreated, the same for all, harmoniously and justly blending discordant forms of fire, with "The Disorderly motion in the Timaeus," ClassicalQuarterly 33 (1939):71-83 (revised version in R. E. Allen, ed., Studies in Plato's Metaphysics [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965], pp. 379-399); reviewof F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae, in Gnomon 27 (1955):65-76 (reprinted in D. J. Furley and R. E. Allen, eds., Studies in PresocraticPhilosophy [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], 1:42-55); "Creation in the Timaeus: Is it a Fiction?", in Allen, Studies, pp. 401-419; "Plato's Supposed Theory of Irregular Figures," Isis 57 (1967):204-209 (reprinted in Vlastos, Platonic Studies [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], pp. 366-373); "Does Timaeus 53C8-D7 Give Support to the Esotericist Thesis?", appendix in Vlastos, Studies, pp. 399-403. 2 "Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies," Classical Philology 42 (1947):156-178 (reprinted in Farley and Allen, 1:156-181); "The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras," Philosophical Review 50(1950):31-57 (reprinted in Furley and Allen, 2: 323-353); "On Heraclitus," American Journal of Philology 76 (1955):337-363 (reprinted in Farley and Allen, 1:42-55); reviewof G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The PresocraticPhilosophers, in Philosop.hicalReview 68 (1959):531-535. 100 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY an "unbreachable regularity" discernible by those who can grasp its Iogos. With the conception of Heraclitus and, afortiori, with that of Democritus, Vlastos claims that "for the first time in history man has achieved a perception of a rational universe which...