The So-called Sempiternalism of the Early Academy
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Abstract
It is a well-established opinion in the literature that the immediate circle of Plato’s disciples maintained that the generation of the cosmos described in the Timaeus was to be understood as an illustrative, or educational metaphor. On this account, Plato’s students were the first to hold an eternalist, metaphorical reading of the generation of the world, challenged by the Peripatos. When criticising their position in the De Caelo, however, Aristotle describes Early Academic philosophers as holding the more nuanced view that the world is ‘indestructible and yet generated’ (ἄφθαρτον μὲν […] γενόμενον δέ). Is it possible to make any sense of this formulation and restore a different position for Early Academic philosophers? In this paper, I claim that the standard reading can be challenged and that there is ground to believe that Speusippus and Xenocrates held that the world is generated but everlasting. What they denied having happened in time and said should be understood as an illustrative metaphor is the transition from the absence of an order to order or, in other words, the cosmogonic process itself.
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The So-called Sempiternalism of the Early Academy
In: MéthexisSearch for other papers by Giulia De Cesaris in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
It is a well-established opinion in the literature that the immediate circle of Plato’s disciples maintained that the generation of the cosmos described in the Timaeus was to be understood as an illustrative, or educational metaphor. On this account, Plato’s students were the first to hold an eternalist, metaphorical reading of the generation of the world, challenged by the Peripatos. When criticising their position in the De Caelo, however, Aristotle describes Early Academic philosophers as holding the more nuanced view that the world is ‘indestructible and yet generated’ (ἄφθαρτον μὲν […] γενόμενον δέ). Is it possible to make any sense of this formulation and restore a different position for Early Academic philosophers? In this paper, I claim that the standard reading can be challenged and that there is ground to believe that Speusippus and Xenocrates held that the world is generated but everlasting. What they denied having happened in time and said should be understood as an illustrative metaphor is the transition from the absence of an order to order or, in other words, the cosmogonic process itself.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 283 | 143 | 20 |
| Full Text Views | 95 | 4 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 173 | 15 | 4 |
