"This excellent work... deserves the serious consideration of all who are interested in contemporary philosophy as well as those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, especially Plato." —Review of Metaphysics In Chorology, John Sallis takes up one of the most enigmatic discourses in the history of philosophy. Plato's discourse on the chora—the chorology—forms the pivotal moment in the Timaeus. The implications of the chorology are momentous and communicate with many of the most decisive issues in contemporary philosophical discussions.

In the Timaeus, Plato’s creation story, Plato describes an entity he refers to as the chora. The Greek word chora is translated as place, room, or space, but Plato’s descriptions of the chora are so notoriously enigmatic that there is disagreement about what, exactly, he intends to indicate by it. In this paper, I address an interpretation of the chora according to which the chora is a kind of cosmic mirror. I argue that this interpretation results in an (...) uncharitable reading of Plato’s explanation. Alternatively, I contend that Plato conceives of the chora as space, place, and matter all at once. The upshot of my view is that it attributes to Plato a more nuanced understanding of space and place and a more coherent explanatory account. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Genealogy of SilenceChōra and the Placelessness of Greek WomenAdam KnowlesIsn’t excess that which the philosopher... must bring back, within measure?—Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin HeideggerAnd if I must make some mention of the virtue of those wives who will now be in widowhood, I will indicate all with a brief word of advice. To be no worse than your proper nature [phuseōs], is (...) a great honor for you; and great honor is hers, whose reputation among males is least, whether for praise or for blame.—PericlesIntroductionPhilosophy in the twentieth century is mapped upon a terrain of silence. At the turn of the century Sigmund Freud sought to translate the silent language of the unconscious, as Friedrich Nietzsche heralded an untimely voice that could not yet be heard.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, foundational thinkers in analytic and continental philosophy respectively, each placed silence at the core of his most influential works.2 In the phenomenological tradition, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas prominently thematized silence,3 while the subsequent generation of poststructuralist, [End Page 1] deconstructionist, and feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray all grappled with silence in various forms.4 Among these works, Lyotard’s theory of the differend, a term that describes an ontological gap of incommunicability, is now a standard term for addressing questions of silence, silencing, the ethics of sayability and trauma.5 Later, in queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s closet became a complex synonym for many forms of silence and silencing.6Beyond this philosophical concern for silence and silencing, a number of similar themes emerged in the art and literature of the twentieth century, demonstrating both the creative and destructive force of silence.7 In literature, dramatists such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter brought silence to the stage, while poets and novelists like Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf traced the presence of silence in language, each thematizing the power of silencing in unique ways.8 In music, John Cage famously utilized silence as an element of his compositions and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergmann and Chantal Akerman likewise crafted silence to structure the cinematic spaces of their works.9 Silence became one of the most persistent themes of philosophy in the twentieth century, both implicitly and explicitly. Could one even go so far as to say that a certain silence haunted philosophy in the twentieth century?Amid this abundance of artistic and philosophical work on silence, “breaking the silence” became the watchword for emancipatory projects pursued by groups such as first-wave feminists, postcolonial scholars, race theorists, and campaigns for social justice.10 These emancipatory projects sought to disrupt processes of silencing by locating, recovering, and translating marginalized voices from the silencing of oppression and disenfranchisement. Though essential political interventions at the historical moment when they emerged, these projects of recovery soon met with the critique of the politics of representation best exemplified by thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Toril Moi.11 Spivak and Moi effectively argued that recovering and speaking for silenced and marginalized voices entails a further form of silencing. These critiques showed that projects of recovering silence from the archives, history, literature, art, culture, and everyday practices of living were constrained by the very concept of silence they employed. As a result, any naive politics of granting a voice and breaking silence became impossible after the 1980s. From this point onward the deconstructive critique of representation folded silence back into itself, destroying any simple binary of empowered speech and disempowered silence. Even despite this powerful deconstruction of the speech/silence binary, philosophy, to the extent that it still operates within representational schemes and a speech/silence binary, still remains haunted by the specter of silence—a silence that carries with it a deeply gendered heritage. Pursuing rigorous analyses of the manifold structures of silence and silencing remains an urgent ethical and political task for feminist philosophy. [End Page 2]This essay seeks to contribute to that task by arguing that, in order to critically engage with the many... (shrink)

Wenn unsere faktische Erfahrung auf etwas beruhen muss, das nicht selbst wieder Erfahrung ist, drängt sich die Frage auf, wie die Vermittlung beider Bereiche zustandekomme. Sowohl Platon als auch Kant haben diese Vermittlung thematisiert, jener im Timaios, dieser im Opus postumum. Platons Dialog ist durch zwei Götteranrufungen in zwei Teile geteilt, denen nach Inhalt und Funktion zwei Werke Kants zugeordnet werden können. Dem ersten Teil, der die Welt unter rein noetischen Voraussetzungen zeigt, entspricht Kants Werk Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. In (...) der Einleitung zum zweiten Teil des Dialogs führt Platon die Chora und einen neuen Typ von Grund ein. Dem entspricht im Opus postumum die Einführung des Äthers, der es erlaubt, von der Metaphysik zur Physik überzugehen, wie es die Chora erlaubt, von der rein noetischen zum empirischen Welt überzugehen. ************ If our factual experience must be based on something that is not itself experience, the question arises as to how the mediation of both areas comes about. Both Plato and Kant addressed this mediation, the former in the Timaeus, the latter in the Opus postumum. Plato’s dialogue is divided into two parts by two invocations to the gods, to which two of Kant’s works can be assigned in terms of content and function. The first part, which shows the world un- der noetic conditions, corresponds to Kant’s work Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwis- senschaft (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science), and in the introduction to the second part of the dialog Plato introduces the chora and a new type of reason. In the Opus postumum, this corresponds to the introduction of the ether, which makes it possible to move from metaphysics to physics, just as the chora makes it possible to move from the purely noetic to the empirical world. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

The aim of the study is to analyze the terminological origins of the concept of «space», which in turn is one of the fundamental philosophical categories. Thus, the concept of space is used in everyday and scientific life, which allows us to explore its diversity. It was worth referring to the original sources of the concept, so in Hebrew we find the concept of space – אֶרֶץ (eretz / arets), which contains the meaning of “land”, “space”, “land of the people”, (...) “country”, “people”, “land for work”, “place of residence”. It turns out, with the help of linguistic sources, that the eretz has its equivalent in the Greek language in the form of χωρα (chora), which refers us to a more detailed study of this concept. So, in Greek the chora it means “country”, “area”, “city”, “village”, “people”, “field”, etc., but the interesting point is that the meaning of the word can be understood only in a specific use depending on from the context. In this case, the chora acquires interesting meanings, as a type of activity, type of work or an area of philosophy. The chora has many word forms, all of which indicate place, movement, exchange, transition, and interpenetration. One of the first to use this word in his philosophy was Plato, so he gave it a different meaning, revealing its deep meanings. The idea of ​​the Platonic chora is important for explaining the universe in ancient times. Thus, the Platonic chora is now referred to as the “nurse of all births”, “receptacle”, “abode”, “cradle”, etc. It acts as a mediator between the world of ideas and the world of copies, it accepts everything that was to be born, without changing, without distorting, it conforms to the law of the cosmos, in it everything is in its place according to its purpose. Consideration of the representatives of Neoplatonism helped to expand, clarify and supplement the conceptual apparatus of the study. The space, once deprived of spirituality (fullness), regains its vital colors. Thus, space is considered not as physical matter, geometric area or length, but as a kind of analogue of the state of interaction of a place and what this place fills. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Motherhood According to KristevaOn Time and Matter in Plato and KristevaFanny SöderbäckThe state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva, whose work will be my focus of attention here, has been criticized for her emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks reducing woman to the biological function (...) of motherhood. Judith Butler, to give an example to which I will return at length, speaks of a “compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce” (Butler 1999, 115; I will refer to this text as GT for the remainder of this essay). Kristeva herself has noted that “it seems... difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression” (Kristeva 2003, 207).I will argue that Kristeva by no means reduces woman to the function of motherhood. Rather, she returns to the maternal body at least in part to free woman from this very reduction. By bringing the mother out of the shadows, she provides women with a past (a genealogy of their own, a community of women, a history hitherto repressed) and, simultaneously, with a future (in the sense of liberating them from predefined roles and positions—from motherhood as the only form of subjectivity available to them). It is exactly the future that is at stake when Kristeva speaks of the maternal, and more specifically, it is the possibility of temporal change that depends on it. The maternal body to which she urges us to return must, as I see it, be understood qua temporalization : that to which we return is temporal, moving, displacing, renewing. The return is neither nostalgic nor aimed at preserving some essential notion of motherhood—it makes possible [End Page 65] new beginnings, allowing for a future pregnant with change and transformation. Butler ends her critique of Kristeva with the following remark—one that is meant to describe what would happen if we stopped focusing on the mother in the way Kristeva has done hitherto: “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (GT, 119). I will attempt to show that these words in fact capture Kristeva’s own project, that such “open future” is exactly what she is aiming at through her continuous return to the maternal body.The implication of this retrieval of the maternal is twofold: First, it situates Kristeva within a materialist tradition and allows her to articulate and inscribe a morphological-phenomenological legacy of embodiment contra merely constructionist or discursive narratives.1 Second, it gives her ground to rearticulate time as inseparable from space and thus to challenge and overcome the deep-rooted tradition that divides time and space alongside a mind-body dualism. Surprisingly, perhaps, she establishes this ground by returning to a thinker who for many feminist scholars is the example par excellence of the very dualism that is put into question: Plato. This essay aims at carefully tracing Kristeva’s engagement with Plato, and I will argue that the breakdown of the distinction between time and space is to be found at the core of his writing. If, as I will argue here, the maternal body to which Kristeva returns must be understood not only as corporeal but also as a temporal principle, then we are forced to think through the intimate relation between temporality and materiality in ways that will come to challenge and renew the very materialist tradition that Kristeva herself most often is understood to represent.Kristeva’s earliest thematization of the maternal appears in her doctoral dissertation, Revolution in Poetic Language. It is here that she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora, associating it with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives.2 Kristeva herself picks up the Greek term chora from Plato’s Timaeus; a dialogue that more than anything deals with the question of beginnings, as it narrates the story of how the cosmos and its living creatures were created. I will turn both to the Platonic text and to... (shrink)

This article aims to consider the permanence of the Greek term ousia, sometimes transcribed as usia, during the early Middle Ages, when the translation by substantia was imposed. We consider two figures of the Carolingian period, John Scottus Eriugena and Ratramnus of Corbia. We suggest that the word ousia/usia may express aspects of being that the Latin term substantia does not support.

Expressing ‘essence’ in the translation and commentary of Timaeus by Calcidius depends on Platonist terminology which is not completely stabilised. We will see how, in his translation, Calcidius translated Greek words as οὐσία or φύσις, but also how he used the word substantia whereas there was no expression of essence in the Greek text. The Latin commentator used both essentia and substantia, but the latter quite often. However, in doing so, he weakened the meaning of the (...) class='Hi'>word substantia. Lastly, Calcidius translated into Latin and used Greek no‑Platonist expressions with a very specific signification of ‘essence’. (shrink)

A ready answer to the question of Empedocles’ thinking about Good and Evil is to be found in Aristotle, who provides us with this simple rule of thumb : Good is associated with Love, and Evil with Hate. Fundamentally obvious as that rule may be, we need to go beyond Aristotle’s words. This article investigates several topics : fire, the sun, water, the hoard of divine thought, reincarnation, Empedoclean ethics, and, finally, the Blessed Ones. Complexity rules our quest to determine (...) what belongs to the Good and what belongs to the Bad. There are times when Love takes advantage of Hate’s ability to cause separation. The sun, manifestation par excellence of fire, is loaded with ambivalence in Empedocles – even though the high value placed almost universally on light is a commonplace in Greek thought. Empedocles is torn between his sense of wonder at the works of Aphrodite and his pessimism on recognizing the infernal cycle in which mortals are involved. (shrink)