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Alex returns with a new episode about the mystical aspects of espionage in the Hebrew Bible and world history, as well as an update about the future of the show

Greg, Isabel, and Alex talk about Greg's paper "The Chora of the Timaeus and Iamblichean Theology." What did it mean for the Neoplatonists for a human to embody the Divine? Similarities between Plato's Chora and Buddhist concepts of "shunyata" or emptiness as the matrix or mother of being. A memorable moment in Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea. Socrates as a Prophet of Islam. Philosophy as initiation.

Greg Shaw from Stonehill College continues the conversation with Isabel and myself about spiritual ascent in Plato's Timaeus and what that would look like to someone wishing to undertake it today. Isabel also told us about a poem by a 17th century Latin American poet named Sor Juana, who in her "First Dream" described a sort of shamanic Night Journey with strong parallels to Plato.

Gregory Shaw from Stonehill College and my friend and fellow Classicist Isabel Farias join me this week to discuss the concept of the chora in Plato's Timaeus. Isabel wrote her thesis at Barnard about the Timaeus. Greg authored a paper about the concept titled "The Chora in the Timaeus and Iamblichean Theurgy." In the abstract to this paper, he offered the following brief description of what the concept is: "The chôra described in the Timaeus (52b) is said to be the receptacle through which the world comes into existence. In some mysterious way she is the mother and nurse that allows the Forms to become manifest. Despite being essential to the work of the Demiurge, the chôra is unknowable, Plato says, except through an illegitimate kind of reasoning, more like dreaming than thinking."