Future Publications

This is where we will bring you the latest information on the publications which we will be working on, fundraising for and eventually will make available here on line or through one of our linked colleagues.

We plan to add the next 4 worksheets as downloadable pdfs shortly.

Here is a short extract from essay No. 12 which was released through Kairos:

THE ANCIENT GREEK INSIGHT

INTO NUMBER.

1989/90 ©

By Keith Critchlow

For Socrates and therefore, Plato, essential causality always is purposeful while the behaviours of the physical elements are merely secondary or “accessory causes”. Synaitia (Paedo 996 Tim. 46C)

Necessity is only a subject worthy of study if it is in relation to nous or divine causation – as necessity is only a quasi-cause.

As so many of the timeless roots of our present-day thinking are found in the ancient Greek civilisation, it is clarifying to refer to the attitude of number in the works of such as Plato the representative of Socratic teaching. Arithimos which we currently translate as number was generally considered to be a plurality of units (plethos monadon) the important philosophical question was the generation of the unit itself and its intrinsic nature. Whereas the Pythagoreans and Plato taught of quality of number, for Aristotle number is only mathematical number, the product of abstraction. Herein lies the epitome of the two possible views of the universe (a) from the top down i.e. ‘things’ emerging due to prior principles and (b) principles as emerging from our abstracting them from our experience. The latter tends to exclude the former but the former does not exclude the latter. However, more seriously and significantly the latter leads to further and further analysis categorisation and atomisation of our experience having no unifying principle, whereas the former takes principle to be its source and therefore by natural logic there is a principle first cause or “first principle” – the unifying ‘harmonia’ in the Platonic view.

The value of the Aristotelian view is that we are clear which ‘range’ or level of behaviour or nature we are speaking or thinking of: the value of the Platonic view is that there are transparencies of levels yet distinctions in an hierarchy of subtlety. (For instance, light permeates air but air cannot permeate light.)