Necessity in the Timaeus

Necessity in the Timaeus

The Demiurge (Creator

Literally, "craftsman

"The creator of Plato's personal world is not a divine comprehending or a individual leader, but (as it were) a manual laborer. Cf. Vlastos, Plato's Universe (pp. 26-27):

Thead covering the supreme god of Plato's cosmos should wear the mask of a manual employee is a triumph of the philosophical fantasy over embedded social prejudice. ... But this divine mechanic is not a drudge. He is an creative person or, more accurately, what an creative person would have to be in Plato's conception of art: not the inventor of new pattern, but the imposer of pre-existing form on as yet formless material.

The Elements

The personal world must have bodily pattern; it must be evident and substantial (31b).

Hence, its components must encompass blaze and earth.

Since fire and soil will have to be blended, there should be at smallest one other ingredient that serves to blend them.

But since fire and soil are solids, we need two intermediates to combine them.

Hence, the demiurge conceived air and water, and organised all four elements proportionally: as blaze is to air, air is to water; as air is to water, water is to soil.

As we will glimpse below, we have not come to the bottom with these four components: there are (geometrical) atoms of which these components are composed.

Features of the Cosmos

A living being

Because it is founded on the pattern of living being (= Animal)

Unique

Because it is founded on a exclusive model (the Form of dwelling being), and the Demiurge makes it as much like its form as he can (subject, of course, to the limitations enforced by the detail that it's made of issue).

It has a soul

Because it is a dwelling being

Spherical

Because that is the most flawless and most beautiful shape

Temporal

Thead covering is, there is time in the cosmos - it is distinuished by temporal predicates. This is because it is modeled on a pattern, an eternal being.

The cosmos will not be eternal, as a Form is, since it arrives into being. But it is as much like a pattern, as close to being eternal, as it can be (37d). When the Demiurge conceived the cosmos, he also conceived time. But what is Plato's delineation of time?

Zeyl's transformation in RAGP reads: "this number, of course, is what we call time." According to this translation, Plato's definition would be that time is the number according to which the likeness of eternity moves. This would bring Plato's delineation close to Aristotle's ("time is the number of shift (change) in esteem of before and after" [Physics 219b2]). On this reading, it is the cosmos that is the "moving likeness of eternity," and time is the number that assesses the change in the cosmos.

But, as Zeyl now accepts (see his newest transformation of the Timaeus), this transformation is incorrect. At best, Plato's text is grammatically ambiguous: it reads "and this is what we call time," where the quotation of 'this' could be either 'number' or 'image'. But it has been conventionally taken ...