Just on the first part of your message. On May 6, referring to the 49b passage of the Timaeus, I didn't say that "'upodoche' is one of two words the Greeks used to refer to the female household servants we call 'nurses'". This doesn't need interpretation, the problem is that I had the words in Greek only without transliteration and this might have confused you. The two 'nurse-words' are trophos and tithene (τροφὸς καὶ τιθήνη). Then I added that at 51a Plato uses the word mother together with the word ypodoche, which is the receptacle (μητέρα καὶ ὑποδοχήν). There I should have also added that mother (meteran) and receptacle are not synonyms, but by using them as a couple Plato transfers (we might say) the meaning of the one to the other. Ypodoche is just "receptacle", not a synonym with mother, nurse, etc.

I had misunderstood you. Thanks for the clarification.

Don

Don,
May be I was ambigous in my commentary and certainly I misunderstood the formal kind of this topic which is not an interpretative one. My commentary was an interpretation of chora ("place", "space") as receptacle, as nurse and as mother (even Aristotle, in Physics, when he discuss the notion of matter was using the maternal metaphor); symmetric, on the masculin side, we have a Father (I identify him with Demiurgos) and a masculin person which teach the Univers "the teaching about [political] power" - this is the god from Politicus.
But all of these are just interpretations and may be I was wrong in my previous reply.
Dan

Dan -

Thanks for your clarification. I now understand your line of thinking.

I'm sorry for having gone into a tizzy. I'm less able than many on this board, so I guess a lot, sometimes wrongly, in attempts at keeping up.

Don