Slow motion theory in fragment of secret doctrine in Plato’s Theaetetus

Abstract

In this article we will work on the notion of slow movements in the fragment of the secret doctrine, which constitute the power to become, the foundation for the generation of qualities in the reality perceived by sensations. Slow movements are quoted in the Theaetetus on the passage 156a, in the fragment which we call here the secret doctrine of the thinkers of nominee found at the beginning of the second answer to Theaetetus in the Platonic dialogue of the same name. The importance of bringing this study to this category of movement is to observe that Plato, though briefly as it appears in the fragment, observed the existence of two movements in the generation of sensations, a slow and a rapid, the first being what we mean by the power of being, without which nothing could become what it will actually be. Plato showed in this passage that the formation of a sensation is something much more complex than imagined the mobilists, with understandings that embrace a momentaneity and a deep fugacity in this formation, being outside the thing or the percipient, since it occurs between both, between the percipient, and the perceived thing, different from, for example, Protagoras would imagine. We will show in this research that from what Plato describes as the formation of the sense/quality pair we see the possibility of a vast and complex theory about what one should understand about the changing in the field of physical things and their due sensations, concentrating on the movement first, characterized as being the condition of possibility for something to become, a power.