Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato by Jenny Bryan (review)

This book is dedicated to the interpretation of the words ἐοικώς/εἰκώς in their appearances in two lines of philosophical verse (Xenophanes B 35: ταῦτα δεδοξάσθαι μὲν ἐοικότα τοῖς ἐτύμοισι and Parmenides B 8.60: τόν σοι ἐγὼ διάκοσμον ἐοικότα πάντα φατίζω), and in a passage from Plato’s Timaeus that characterizes his own cosmological account as an εἰκὼς μῦθος. Bryan’s project may at first appear an excuse for philological overkill, but she presents an interesting, ambitious, persuasive, and charmingly written account of the history of these words based on philological parallels ranging widely through the literature of the period. She offers an intertextual reading of the three passages, showing how the word means something different each time, and that on each occasion of its use the author is alluding to one or more predecessors with a view to correcting past misuse. Bryan has something for philosophically interested readers too. She carefully explores the word’s epistemic force in each author, and presents a tidy picture of the authors’ differing views on the limits of our ability to have knowledge of the world.

In Xenophanes, ἐοικώς describes a particular kind of likeness, namely contingent and potentially specious similarity. B 35 recommends us to accept “these things” (which Bryan takes to be the contents of Xenophanes’ teaching) as like the truth, and warns us that what he teaches may be false. This accords well with a “fallibilist” reading of B 34. Even if what Xenophanes says is true, humans cannot know that it is true. Why not? Because humans have “an essentially perspectival brand of cognition” and consequently are “limited to opinion” (54). Knowledge of such things is limited to the gods.

In Parmenides, certain knowledge is not reserved for the gods alone. “Parmenides presents himself as crossing the barrier between divine and human thought” (58). “What matters is not whether you think like a human or like a god” (59) but what you think about. “Once one has focused one’s reason on ‘what is and cannot not be,’ one can attain understanding equal to that of the gods” (59). Bryan examines four meanings of ἐοικώς: “similar,” “fitting/appropriate/suitable,” “specious,” and “plausible/likely/probable,” concluding that in the phrase διάκοσμον ἐοικότα all four may be in play. The fault with the cosmology Parmenides presents in the Doxa is that although it is false, mortals believe that it is true; they find it persuasive, but if they knew better they would not. It is subjectively trustworthy.

Bryan restricts her discussion of Plato to interpreting Timaeus 29b1–d3, which introduces the expression εἰκὼς μῦθος to describe the cosmology he will present. She offers an important new interpretation of the expression, reading εἰκώς in terms of εἰκών: the cosmological account is a likeness (εἰκών) and the account of it is “likely” (εἰκώς), in “a specifically technical sense of εἰκώς. His ‘likelihood’ is the quality possessed by a successful account of a likeness as a likeness. Such an account acknowledges and explains the way the model’s nature influences that of the likeness” (192). Since the truths that hold of the world of Coming-to-be are qualified truths, as opposed to the stable truths about the world of Being, an appropriate account of the former must consist of qualified truths. Thus εἰκώς does not imply that the cosmology is deficient: any account of a likeness, even a perfectly correct one, is εἰκώς if it explains how the likeness is likened after its model. Deficiency is implied by μῦθος. Unlike λόγοι, μῦθοι are unverifiable. The subject matter of the cosmological μῦθος is beyond human grasp. Only the gods can verify whether a cosmology is correct or not. But unlike the pessimistic Xenophanes, Bryan suggests, Plato hints that our share in the divine (Tim. 43c–d), may enable us to transcend our mortal limitations by studying cosmology and above all astronomy (186–189). “By likening our thoughts to something modelled on the intelligible realm we come closer to the mind that performed the original act of likening” (189).

This is a very worthwhile book that, from its unusual vantage point...