Ian MacFarlane

The Timaeus is perhaps the most unusual of Plato’s dialogues. In this paper, I attempt to interpret Timaeus’s strange speech, which makes up most of the dialogue. I argue that Timaeus has grasped the grave challenge posed to philosophic reason by men like Hesiod who claim that mysterious gods are the first causes of the world, and therefore one cannot say that there are any true necessities governing this world. If this is true, then philosophy, as the study of nature, which depends on the existence of necessity, would be impossible. Timaeus articulates two serious attempts to meet this challenge by demonstrating the stability and rational comprehensibility of the world from solid first principles: one according to which mind is the cause of all things; another according to which everything comes to be through mindless necessity. But he ultimately suggests that neither of these attempts have been successful, thereby demonstrating the limits of natural science’s ability to meet the religious challenge. Timaeus’s speech also has a rhetorical purpose related to this failure: insofar as he finds himself unable adequately to meet the religious challenge, and yet is still attracted to and finds worthwhile the pursuit of philosophy, he thinks a rhetorical account of the cosmos is necessary to shore up faith in reason for elite and educated young men who find themselves inclined to natural science. The more rhetorical aspects of Timaeus’s speech, and above all his account of the triangles, serve this purpose.

The relationship between mind and necessity is one of the major points of difficulty for the interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus. At times Timaeus seems to say the demiurge is omnipotent in his creation, and at other times seems to say he is limited by pre-existing matter. Most interpretations take one of the two sides, but this paper proposes a novel approach to interpreting this issue which resolves the difficulty. This paper suggests that in his speech Timaeus presents two hypothetical models of creation, one with an omnipotent demiurge and one where he is limited by matter, so as to investigate their theoretical and empirical validity. Further, he shows that each model is ultimately an inadequate explanation of the first principles of the cosmos. Timaeus’ speech is therefore properly understood to be aporetic: it leaves its listeners aware of the difficulties inherent in the two models of creation, but without a more viable alternative.