Timaeus Material

Timaeus Material from Peter Manchester

Peter Manchester was a cosmic thinker. Peter always seemed to have the big picture in mind, and this fact animated his philosophy. Legend has it Peter was an explorer who was able to bring back to Earth the knowledge of the paradigmatic Sphere–knowledge too big for most thinkers to squeeze back into the earthly vehicle. He did this through a body of ancient and archaic literature under the designation of spherics (σφαιρική, sphairikē) and its modern analog in the philosophy of time and eternity. More exactly, Peter performed the archaeology of Husserl’s schema of inner time-consciousness by bringing Husserl’s diagram of retention and protention back through Aristotle’s twofold Now interval into its Neoplatonic and Pythagorean context. This is the project of his 2005 book The Syntax of Time. For more on that, check out the spherics section (Section 1) of my Projects page: https://randolphdible.com/projects/

Plato’s cosmology comes in large part from his Pythagorean book Timaeus. Since the standard scholarship on Plato and Aristotle have for decades been written under the spell of a philosophical hermeneutic of the written evidence of Ancient Greek thought, some of the literature counteracting this with a hermeneutic of the spirit goes under the designation of the unwritten doctrine (ἄγραφα δόγματα, the agrapha dogmata). You can find a little bit about that on my Projects page as well. See the works of Krämer, Gaiser, and Reale for more about that. For Peter Manchester, the fact that the ancients were under a different spell is very important. If we are to get Ancient Greek ontology and phenomenology correct, we will need to take very seriously the all-encompassing presence and support of the Sphere of the All, even for folks who seem to be making cosmological arguments against the Platonic and Pythagorean theology of the sphere (Aristotle!).

Peter Manchester did not refer to the agrapha dogmata so much offer an unwritten doctrine of his own. In some respects, the writing was on the wall. Just as Plato tells us that he cannot directly tell us everything we seek, or that it is only for philosophers, or only for those trained in geometry, just as Heraclitus ‘the Obscure’ tells us directly what he is doing, so we are very directly told about the sphere, but it only sticks for those with the right attitude. Open your hearts to get the full effect of this Timaeus material:

Actually, this is a more to come kind of thing… check back soon!