019 - The Chora in Plato's Timaeus - with Greg Shaw and Isabel Farias

Practical Neoplatonism

Gregory Shaw from Stonehill College and my friend and fellow Classicist Isabel Farias join me this week to discuss the concept of the chora in Plato's Timaeus. Isabel wrote her thesis at Barnard about the Timaeus. Greg authored a paper about the concept titled "The Chora in the Timaeus and Iamblichean Theurgy." In the abstract to this paper, he offered the following brief description of what the concept is: "The chôra described in the Timaeus (52b) is said to be the receptacle through which the world comes into existence. In some mysterious way she is the mother and nurse that allows the Forms to become manifest. Despite being essential to the work of the Demiurge, the chôra is unknowable, Plato says, except through an illegitimate kind of reasoning, more like dreaming than thinking."