Re: R.J. Lipton and K.W. Regan • Did Euclid Really Mean ‘Random’?
These are the forms of time,
which imitates eternity and
revolves according to a law
of number.
Plato • Timaeus • 38 A
Benjamin Jowett (trans.)
It is clear from Aristotle and places in Plato that the good of reasoning from fair samples and freely chosen examples was bound up with notions of probability, which in the Greek idiom meant likeness, likelihood, and likely stories, the question being how much the passing image could tell us of the original idea.
Inquiry Into Inquiry 
One of the reasons that Whitehead kept returning to Plato (and, quite frequently, the Timaeus) was because the Greeks held such a high (if often implicit) evaluation of the role of narrative in explanation. Although, “implicit” is probably the wrong term: narrative was so obviously important it never occurred to them to have to justify it. (“Symposium” is my favorite example of this.)
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Yes, a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?
Bare intimations of a Cosmos so far beyond our grasp that we can but strain to image it in hyperbole, parable, ellipsis …
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Oh, on this point, I highly recommend Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals —
☞ Review : Murdoch on Metaphysics
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