This Week In Philosophy Publics
Space, Place, Gender, and Difference ties together this month's posts.
The Story of Space is a series of essays that trace the inauguration of concepts of space and place in Western Philosophy from the Presocratic natural philosophers through to Plato and Aristotle. The thread I am pulling through these treatments is the co-production of spatial concepts alongside concepts of womb/woman and ontological difference.
In brief, Plato inherits a conception of space as an archaic power very much akin to gravity. This power called ananke or Necessity in the oldest cosmologies spins and shakes to separate out the elements into their proper realms - fire, air, water, and the heaviest earth on the bottom. Plato marries this account with productive and reproductive metaphors to come up with chora-space, a matrix that serves as an interval between the intelligible realm of Forms and the sensible phenomenal world of our experience. According to him, space-chora is a third kind of thing between being and non-being. As such, it serves both to differentiate and to put into communication intelligible Forms and sensible beings. With Aristotle, the receptacle chora’s power is further reduced to an inert envelope around things that situates them in place.
Thus the matrix of space becomes situated place such that no two things can be in the same place at the same time and still be two. This is the first principle of ontological difference, according to Aristotle. It is the inverse of Plato’s more positive rendition, that this water here and that water there are different because they are in different spaces.
Below are the three central pieces of this account. All these pieces will be woven together into a single long-read, so look out for that in the coming weeks!
From the annals of our top fifty philosophy books of all time, originally published on Goodreads, come these two brief exegetical pieces on works by Iris Marion Young and Jacques Derrida. Enjoy!