TimaeusPlato
About Timaeus
The is Plato's cosmology. Where the asks how to order the soul and the city, the asks how the visible cosmos came to be ordered at all.
A divine craftsman, the Demiurge, looks to the eternal Forms and fashions the world as the best possible image of an intelligible model. Time is created as "a moving image of eternity," the celestial bodies serve as its markers, and the world-soul is constructed from a precise mathematical mixture of sameness, difference, and being. The four elements (earth, water, air, fire) are built from geometric solids, which are in turn built from triangles. The physical world is mathematics all the way down.
The human body receives extended treatment. Plato accounts for the placement of organs, the circulation of blood, disease, and sensation in terms of the same geometric and teleological principles that govern the cosmos. The body is not incidental to the soul's life; it is the medium through which the soul encounters necessity and must learn to impose rational order.
The was the most widely read Platonic dialogue in the Latin Middle Ages, transmitted through Calcidius's partial translation. Its account of a rational creator ordering matter according to mathematical form became the dominant framework for Christian natural philosophy until Aristotle's displaced it in the thirteenth century.
Appears in 18 ideas
Science
- ElementWhat are the basic building blocks of the physical world, and how do they combine to form complex things?
- MedicineIs medicine an art or a science, and what is the relation of health to disease?
- AnimalWhat distinguishes the animal from the plant and the human, and what is the nature of animal life?
Metaphysics
- TimeWhat is time: a feature of the world, a form of the mind, or the measure of motion?
- EternityIs eternity merely time without end, or a wholly different mode of being, existence outside time altogether?
- MatterWhat is matter, the stuff of the physical world, and how does it relate to form, mind, and change?
- ChangeWhat is change, and how can something become what it was not?
- Necessity and ContingencyMust whatever is be as it is, or could things be otherwise?
- ChanceIs chance a real feature of the world, or only a name for our ignorance of causes?
- AngelAre there pure intelligences, bodiless minds between God and man, and what would their existence mean for the order of being?
- SpaceIs space a thing in itself, a property of bodies, or a form of the mind?
- WorldWhat is the universe, and how does it stand in relation to God and to man?
- Same and OtherWhat makes things the same, and what makes them different?
- QualityAre the qualities we perceive in things real properties of nature, or projections of the mind?