The term has been used in philosophy by Plato to designate a receptacle (as a "third kind" [triton genos]; Timaeus 48e4), a space, a material substratum, or an interval.
— Plato, Timaeus, 52a-b[2][3] "So likewise it is right that the substance which is to be fitted to receive frequently over its whole extent the copies of all things intelligible and eternal should itself, of its own nature, be void of all the forms.
[7] Kitaro Nishida stated that he based his concept of basho, Place, on the abyssal nothing mu inspired by his reading of the Plato's notion of khôra.
[9] Jacques Derrida uses khôra to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being, characterizing khôra as a formless interval, alike to a non-being, in between which the "Forms" were received from the intelligible realm (where they were originally held) and were "copied", shaping into the transitory forms of the sensible realm; it "gives space" and has maternal overtones (a womb, matrix):.
[10] The project proposed the construction of a garden in the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of the khôra.