The category ‘Open yet not open’ is intended to bring together authors who have written about Plato's Atlantis in a strangely ambiguous way in their works. This means, for example, that they write at length about how Plato had an ethos of truth and also strove for truth in his historiography, and that a tradition from Egypt is also possible, but then they suddenly declare, without good reason, that Atlantis is only a fabrication. Or they first rule out the possibility that Atlantis could be a real place with grand words, only to later make statements that unambiguously point to the reality of Atlantis.
Strictly speaking, it is therefore not permissible to describe these scholars as ‘open’ to Atlantis as a real place, because they have more or less clearly rejected this. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to summarily count them among the convinced Atlantis sceptics. Because they are not. Either there is a contradiction in their statements, or their scepticism about Atlantis only exists on the surface as lip service, so at least it seems, but beneath the surface there are many thoughts that point towards its existence.
In order to avoid having to assign these scientists to one of the two camps, the category ‘open yet not open’ was created here.