Plato's Universe
"Gregory Vlastos' influence on the study of Greek philosophy, notably of the Presocratics and Plato, has been great and admirable. His papers on Plato were collected in 1973, but this is his first book. It is a fine short study, written with the familiar rhetorical elegance that marks his forensic style but designed for delivery to an audience composed not wholly or mainly of specialists. Where controversies threaten they are generally relegated to footnotes or appendixes. Professor Vlastos' master-question is: "did the Greek really discover what we now mean by 'science'?" His answer is: No, but they discovered "the conception of the cosmos that is presupposed by natural science and by its practice". There are three chapters to the book. The first finds new patterns of rationality common to all the earliest physiologoi, natural philosophers, from Thales near the beginning of the sixth century BC to Heraclitus near the beginning of the fifth. The other chapters are chiefly analyses of Plato's Timaeus, the first tackling the astronomy and the other the analysis of matter. G. E. L. Owen Times Literary Supplement, 1977"