10 - The cognition of appetite in Plato's Timaeus

Summary

This chapter describes some of the cognitive accomplishments with which appetite in the Timaeus is credited. It addresses the question how the Timaeus can account for those accomplishments in terms of the cognitive resources that it ascribes to the mortal soul-parts. There is good reason to think that the Timaeus' version of tripartition allows and indeed requires communication between reason and the non-rational parts: reason can share information with spirit, and it can issue directives to both of the non-rational parts, which they may or may not obey. Plato can have the Philebus' images in the soul and the Timaeus' images on the liver's surface. The psychological theory that emerges takes reason and appetite to be closely integrated with one another. The thought processes of reason, the theory holds, tend to be accompanied by exercises of the sensory imagination which illustrate reason's accounts, assertions, and denials in a sensory mode.