WIP in Ancient Philosophy: Cinzia Arruzza (Boston University), The Second Sex in Plato’s Timaeus

The WIP in Ancient Philosophy Workshop organized by Cinzia Arruzza and Marc Gasser-Wingate. This week's speaker is Cinzia Arruzza. Abstract: This chapter argues that Timaeus presents us with a coherent, albeit unpleasant, story of devolution where the souls bear responsibility for their troublesome incarnations in inferior forms of life, starting with female human life. This story is a plausible account, for it gives a reasonable explanation of the Demiurge’s reasons in ordering the creation of the zōa in this way. That is, since all immortal rational souls are cut from the same mixture with equal capacities, the Demiurge would be unfair to distribute the souls in bodies of different value. This explains the Demiurge’s decision to incarnate the first generation of living beings as the best kind of living being – namely, man. Due to their cowardice and failure to master the disturbances coming from sense perception, some souls are embodied as women in the second incarnation. Hence, embodiment as a woman is the marker of a moral failure and women’s nature is characterized by fearfulness and a thumotic deficit. I first address the description of the first generation of living beings as men. Then, I analyze the incarnation of certain souls in the second generation as women and the struggle with the passions and disturbances necessitated by embodiment. Finally, I focus on the fashioning of the sexed body and on sexual reproduction.