Timaeus

Overview

The Timaeus is one of Plato's last major dialogues, probably written in the 360s BCE, and the most influential of all his works for the subsequent history of science and philosophy. It is the only Platonic dialogue devoted primarily to natural philosophy — the study of the physical world — and it presents a complete cosmology: an account of the origin and structure of the universe, of the nature of matter, of time and space, and of the human body and soul. The dialogue takes the form of a speech by Timaeus, a philosopher from the Italian city of Locri, who delivers a "likely story" (eikos mythos) about how the cosmos was made by a divine craftsman, the demiurge, who shaped the world after the pattern of the Forms. For more than two millennia, the Timaeus was the authoritative text of cosmology in the Western tradition — the only major work of Plato known continuously in the Latin Middle Ages.

Author

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was the student of Socrates and the founder of the Academy in Athens, where Aristotle was among his students. The Timaeus belongs to his late period, and it is a synthesis of his mature thought: the theory of Forms, the doctrine of the soul, and a new account of the physical world that draws on the pre-Socratic traditions — above all Pythagorean mathematics, which supplies the geometrical structure of the cosmos. The dialogue is also the sequel to the Republic: it opens with a summary of the ideal city, and its cosmology is presented as the account of the world in which that city would be realized.

Historical Background

The Timaeus was written in the context of the crisis of the Greek city-state and the flourishing of the mathematical and astronomical sciences in the fourth century BCE. Plato's Academy had made mathematics the foundation of philosophical education — the inscription over its door reputedly read "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter" — and the Timaeus is the monument to that conviction: the physical world is understood through number, proportion, and geometrical figure. The dialogue's cosmology was also Plato's answer to the materialist accounts of the world — above all the atomism of Democritus — which explained everything by the chance motion of atoms in the void. Against materialism, Plato presents a teleological account: the world is the product of intelligent design, and its order is the expression of the good.

Key Ideas

The Demiurge and the Creation of the Cosmos

The central figure of the dialogue is the demiurge (demiourgos, the craftsman), a divine artisan who creates the cosmos. Timaeus's account is careful and qualified: the demiurge is "good" and "wishes everything to be as like himself as possible," and he brings order to a world that is not created from nothing but shaped from a preexisting chaos — a "receptacle" of becoming. The creation is not creation ex nihilo but the imposition of order on disorder. The demiurge's motive is goodness: "He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible." The world is therefore the best possible world of its kind: a living being with a soul, ordered by reason, and as perfect as the physical medium allows.

The Forms as the Model

The demiurge creates the world by looking to an eternal model: the Forms. The world of becoming is an image of the world of being; the visible cosmos is "a moving image of eternity," and time itself is "a moving image of eternity" — the numbered succession in which the eternal order is copied. This is the cosmological application of the theory of Forms: the Forms are not merely the objects of knowledge, as in the middle dialogues, but the pattern of creation. The sensible world is intelligible because it participates in the Forms; science is possible because the world is an ordered image of an intelligible model.

The Receptacle

To explain how the Forms can be imaged in the physical world, Plato introduces the third element of his ontology: the receptacle (hypodoche) or "nurse of becoming," the space in which the images of the Forms appear. The receptacle is not a thing with properties — it is "the nature that receives all bodies," that "must be completely free of all characteristics" — but the medium in which the elements (earth, water, air, fire) and their transformations occur. The receptacle is Plato's answer to the question of matter: it is the permanent substratum of change, itself unchanging, that makes change possible.

The World Soul and the Human Soul

The demiurge does not only shape matter; he creates the world soul, which he composes from the Same, the Different, and Being, and which animates and orders the cosmos. The human soul is created by the demiurge in the same ingredients, and it is then planted in a body made by the lesser gods. The account of the human body and soul in the Timaeus is the first systematic Greek physiology, and its tripartite psychology — reason in the head, spirit in the heart, appetite in the belly — provides the framework that the Republic had used for the state and that later Platonism would develop into a complete anthropology.

Important Passages

The most famous passages of the Timaeus are the opening of the creation narrative, the definition of time, and the account of the elements. The creation is introduced with the words: "Was the world always in existence and without beginning, or has it come into being and has it a beginning? It has come into being; for it is visible and tangible and has a body." The purpose of creation is stated in the famous sentence: "He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything." And the definition of time is among the most quoted sentences in the history of philosophy: "Time came into being together with the heaven, so that, having come into being together, they might also be dissolved together, if ever a dissolution of them should occur — the pattern of eternity, which moves according to number."

Influence

The influence of the Timaeus is difficult to overstate. It was the standard cosmology of the Western tradition for two thousand years: the only major Platonic dialogue continuously known in the Latin West through the Middle Ages, it shaped the medieval picture of the universe as an ordered whole created by a good God. Its account of the demiurge influenced Christian theology (though the Church Fathers had to distinguish the Platonic craftsman from the Christian creator), and its cosmology influenced the scientific tradition from the Pythagoreans through Copernicus and Kepler, who found in the Timaeus the conviction that the world is mathematically ordered. Its theory of the elements — earth, water, air, fire, and the fifth element, the aether — dominated natural philosophy until the seventeenth century. Even after the scientific revolution, the dialogue's deepest claims — that the world is intelligible, that order is prior to disorder, that time is the image of eternity — have remained part of the intellectual inheritance of the West.

Sources

• Plato. Timaeus. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Plato's Timaeus" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Plato" (iep.utm.edu/plato)
• Cornford, F.M. Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary. London: Routledge, 1937.