Workshop in Ancient Philosophy

Chair: Michele Pecorari

Abstract: The adjective atopos, from which atopia is derived, is formed by the privative alpha and topos (“place”). From its earliest attestations, the privative force of the prefix oscillates between “without a place” and “out of place,” while its semantic range extends from the unexpected and exceptional to the bizarre (paradoxos) and the absurd (alogos), with an apparent predominance of negative connotations. In all cases, the adjective indicates that the thing of which it is predicated escapes our ordinary conceptual categories; its most common translation is therefore “strange.”

In Plato, the adjective occurs 121 times, whereas the noun—far less common in general—appears only five times. As has been noted, atopia, understood as “singularity,” is the distinctive trait of the Platonic Socrates (a trait absent from Aristophanes and Xenophon): Socrates is singular in the sense that he is comparable to no human being, whether past or present (cf. Symp. 221c–d); he is, in other words, a unicum. While the studies devoted to Socrates as atopos are very few, there is, to my knowledge, no broader investigation of Plato’s use of this semantic field beyond the figure of Socrates. The aim of my research is therefore to fill this gap.

I would like to begin with a particularly striking case: the reading of two parallel passages in which the same dialogical pattern seems to recur. In both, Socrates describes an image, and his interlocutor responds by calling it atopon. The two passages are well known: the dream recounted in the proem of the Crito (a dream-image) and the underground Cave that opens Book VII of the Republic (an allegorical image). I shall argue that these two images constitute exemplary instances of the philosophical function that Plato assigns to atopia—in a technical sense of the term—transforming it into an effective device of his dialogical writing.

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_{Workshop in Ancient Philosophy Convenors: Alexander Bown (MT), Marion Durand (HT), Ursula Coope (TT).}