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The Timaeus

Timaeus’s Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God (27b-c):

  1. The cosmos “is both visible and tangible and it has body.”
  2. All things that are visible and tangible and have body are perceptible.
  3. All perceptible things are grasped by opinion.
  4. All things grasped by opinion are begotten things.
  5. All begotten things “come to be by the agency of some cause.”
  6. Hence, the cosmos came to be by the agency of some cause (sc. the Demiurge).

Timaeus’s description of the cosmos:

  • Modeled after the form of Living Being (the Demiurge himself?). (29e, 30c)
  • Being generated, it has a bodily form. (31b)
  • Its body is a “solid” (i.e., three-dimensional), and thus has four “terms” (i.e., elements): fire, air, water, earth. (32b)  Compare this with the Pythagoreans’ treatment of the tetractus as a model for the generation of the cosmos.
  • Its body takes the form of a sphere. (33b)
  • It has no organs. (33c)
  • It is self-sufficient. (33d)
  • Being modeled after the form of Living Being, it has a soul. (30b, 34c)
  • Its soul is a sophisticated admixture of the forms of Being, Sameness, and Difference. (35a-37a)

So what’s new in the Timaeus?

Demiurge as a causal link interposed between being (forms) and becoming (their instances—perceptible objects). (28c, 50c)  Possible response to the Parmenides’s Separation Argument here.

A new ontology: forms (the “father”), their instances (the “child”), and the receptacle (the “wetnurse” (49a) or “mother”). (50c 52d))  Possible response to the Parmenides’s Dilemma of Participation intimated at 50c ff.  Here’s an image to help.

Science is philosophically respectable, since the cosmos is a divine and beautiful creation. Plato’s “chemistry” (54a-57a) is ingenious and sophistcated.