Unnamed odours: the sense of smell in Plato's Timaeus

The article is devoted to the problem of the sense of smell in Plato's Timaeus . Any study of Plato's doctrines requires first of all an examination of the rich tradition of the exegesis of his texts. In this article, author discusses the works of such famous scholars of Plato's philosophy as Francis Cornford, Gregory Vlastos, Denis O'Brien and others. Despite the fact that the problem of the sense of smell is not among the central themes in Plato's cosmology, it turns out to be connected with many of them: the problem of the correspondence elements to forms of regular polyhedra, the problem of division into species of elements, the question of the structure of surfaces of regular polyhedra, etc. The author tried to present the question of the sense of smell in the Timaeus as a consistent theory, which can be placed in the context of the theories of his predecessors, such as Alcmaeon, Empedocles and Democritus, and his followers, first of all Aristotle. The author accepts the view that odours are mixtures of water and air (Vlastos). Reconstructing the theory of the sense of smell as a part of the whole theory of perception, the author comes to the conclusion that odours have no species and names because they don't belong to the one idea of the element. Unlike colors, sounds and juices (which retain their identity even being mixed with other elements: color - with fire, taste - with water, sound - with air) odours have a half-formed, mixed, nature. In the light of this reconstruction, Plato's theory of odours appears to pave the way to a more developed Aristotle's theory of smell.