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Abstract
Near the end of his speech, Timaeus outlines a theory of bodily health and disease which has seemed to many commentators loosely unified or even inconsistent (81e–86a). But this section is better unified than it has appeared, and gives us at least one important insight into the workings of physical causality in the Timaeus. I argue first that the apparent disorder in Timaeus’s theory of disease is likely a deliberate effect planned by the author. Second, the taxonomy of disease in the passage consists of one genus subsuming two species. Third, in Timaeus’s theory, health lies between perfect stability and a chaos of all possible motions; this indicates a conception of health as the activation of the body's powers in the right way. A power is a property directed towards bringing about some change. Fourth, the activation of these powers can change depending on the location of their possessors. This last point shows that causation among the physical items in the Timaeus involves structures as well as pushes.
Notes
1This paper was written with the support of the University of Oxford and of the European Research Council (ERC), as part of the ongoing ERC-funded project Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies at the University of Oxford, directed by Anna Marmodoro. I am grateful to Anna Marmodoro for the opportunity to participate in this special issue, as well as for extensive and generous support through the project. I am also grateful to Tomasz Tiuryn, Elena Draghici-Vasilescu, Melinda Letts, the Early Career Writers’ Group at The University of Oxford, Céline Sabiron, Jan Machielsen, Amy Li, Lynn McAlpine, John Miles, David Yates, Tamer Nawar, Catherine Rowett, and Adina Covaci-Prince for comments on earlier drafts. Laura Grams and Pavel Gregoric helped me locate a copy of Prof. Grams article.
2For a more detailed outline, see Grams, ‘Medical Theory in Plato's ‘Timaeus’’, 187–9.
3Timaeus has earlier posited four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, and associated each element with a Platonic solid (48b–e, 53b–57d).
4For more on structure in Plato, see Harte, Plato on Parts and Wholes.
5These are psychological reactions, and so are not logically entailed by the text. But each is a response to a specific statement in the text, and would not be an unreasonable thought for a reader to entertain.
6Grams argues that there are three kinds of cause, grouping increase and lack together as one cause (‘Medical Theory in Plato's ‘Timaeus’’, 166).
7In the Republic, Socrates argues that some properties lead our senses to conflicting evaluations (e.g. large and small) while other properties lead us to unproblematic attributions (e.g. ‘being a finger’, 523b–c). Timaeus has constructed a higher-level instance of the former kind, since here it is not sense perception but calculation (a higher-level faculty) that fails to declare that the passage is organized more in one way than another.
8By comparison, Socrates claims that the forms can be known more clearly than sensible objects (Rep. 476–80), but does not mean that it is impossible to doubt the forms' existence.
9The one-level reading of the passage is also committed to this claim.
10Of course, if we consider the elements within the body at a high enough level of magnification, we can always think of unmixed elements in the body. What I deny, however, is the existence of unmixed masses of elements in the body.
11One could also analyse this case using one of the other causes from C1, but in any case the disease is being assigned a cause from C1.
12For a different reading of the taxonomy of diseases of the soul, see Lautner, ‘Plato's Account of the Diseases of the Soul in ‘Timaeus’ 86B1–87B9’. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing out that the mania and amathia may not pair up with pleasure and pain as neatly as I suggest here. Whether or not one agrees with my reading of mania and amathia, the two-level taxonomy of diseases of the soul is clearly correct.
13I am grateful to Tomasz Tiuryn for raising this objection.
14See the second section.
15I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
16The standard reading, of course, is supported by the Greek, but so is my reading. Nothing forces us to understand nosêmatôn with tôn men allôn.
17Brisson takes the comparison to be with 81a-d; I think this is untenable, but it at least shows that not all scholars have thought the comparison was with C1 (Plato, Timée; Critias, n. 734).
18I am grateful to the anonymous referees for pressing this objection, and thus helping me, as I think, to meet it better.
19I have argued separately that the Timaeus as a whole posits powerful rather than inert physical items (Prince, ‘Physical Change in Plato's Timaeus’); here I give new arguments focused on the disease section.
20The metaphysics of powers is much more involved than this summary, but these few points suffice for my argument and are not controversial. For more on (contemporary) powers metaphysics, see Mumford, Dispositions; Molnar, Powers; Heil, From an Ontological Point of View; and Marmodoro, Metaphysics of Powers.
21Grams argues that Timaeus's theory takes causal factors as its central terms, not body parts or locations (‘Medical Theory in Plato's ‘Timaeus’’, 168). I take this claim to support reading Timaeus's theory as involving powers.
22In the fifth section, I will attribute to Timaeus four causal principles. I know of no principled [sic] way to distinguish ‘principles’ from ‘laws’. What I deny here is that Timaeus thinks that individual entities do what they do because they are obeying causal laws; the principles he endorses can be seen as general descriptions of how individual entities behave in virtue of the causal powers each individual thing has.
23Some might be tempted to read Timaeus's theory as positing no causes except bumps and pushes; I show in the fifth section why this is mistaken.
24Zeyl translates more colloquially: ‘all sorts of changes in all sorts of ways’. I have translated literally to avoid prejudging how the claim should be read.
25All emphases in the following are mine.
26There may be a subtler instance of this one-many opposition in Timaeus's statement that ‘since there is in fact more than one variety of fire and the other elements, diseases can arise because the wrong variety is present’ (pleiona henos onta tugchanei, 82a5, emphasis added).
27This is not the only way Timaeus characterizes disease, but it is a common thread running through C1, C2, and C3. In C2, Timaeus uses the contrast between forward and backward, as well as metaphors of hostility and war. In C3, he favours metaphors of purity versus mixtures, and describes elements in the body as overpowering one another. But these additional ways of characterizing diseases are limited to their respective species, while the one-many opposition is found throughout the disease theory.
28A physical item could instantiate an infinity of motions serially, given an infinity of time. But no mortal living thing has this much time.
29Since powers are typically individuated by their manifestations, this claim raises many questions about Timaeus' views. Does he individuate his powers in some other way? If not, it may be part of his conception that what makes something a disease is that it reduces or destroys the individuality of the body's normal powers.
30Perhaps because the forms do not admit of being numbered, and so also cannot be in or out of proportion.
31Even the verb menein towards the end, which is not part of the usual formulae for forms, is applied to the realm of forms when Timaeus discusses time (37d6).
32This principle is a corollary of the axiom that nothing is produced from nothing.
33This fact might suggest that Timaeus has a mechanistic explanation in mind, but the fifth section will show why this is mistaken.
34This reading, however, should not obscure the fact that ancient medical writers made sophisticated distinctions between agential and non-agential sources of change (Holmes, ‘Causality, Agency, and the Limits of Medicine’, 308).
35I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this point.
36One might treat MTS as fundamental and use it to explain the principle that motion is caused by nonuniformity (57d–8a), or vice versa; I do not consider here whether there are grounds for preferring one of these reductions to the other. To this list of four principles one might add the shaking of the receptacle; I omit it from my list above because it is not at all clear what effect the shaking has on individual particles of the elements. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing out this omission.
37When Timaeus denies the existence of holkê, he is denying that elements pull other elements towards themselves. Instead, the elements that move have within themselves powers for movement towards what is like them. This is a push from within, not a pull from a distance.
38Described this way, one might think I am now claiming that moving in all directions is a characteristic of health, not disease. But this impression is an effect produced by the description; one could describe the same phenomenon by saying that in health the particles move in just one way, namely such as to maintain the right proportions throughout the body. There is thus no contradiction between my characterization of health here and the earlier claim that diseases are constituted by too many motions.
39‘The system is as thoroughly mechanistic in its substance as it is teleological in its regulative principles … the system … involves only two factors: geometrical structure and motion’ (Mourelatos, ‘Plato's Science – His View and Ours of His’, 12).
40An objector might also cite 81a, although this passage, about the movement of nutrients by the blood, is in fact indecisive.
41The difference between living and dead bodies is also relevant when Timaeus discusses the fibres in the blood at 82d1–2 and again at 85d2–5. There he seems to say, first, that the fibres prevent the blood from congealing (since it does congeal when the fibres are removed), and, second, that the fibres cause the blood to congeal – an obvious contradiction. But the earlier passage discusses living bodies, the latter passage dead bodies. It is neither surprising nor contradictory if Timaeus thinks the powers of substances in the body change at or near death. This solves a problem raised by Taylor (Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, 605 ad 85d2–5).
42I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting the answer adopted here.