Nature and divinity in Plato's Timaeus
By: Sarah Broadie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781107012066
Subjects: PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical
Description: "Plato's Timaeus is one of the most influential and challenging works of ancient philosophy to have come down to us. Sarah Broadie's rich and compelling study proposes new interpretations of major elements of the Timaeus, including the separate Demiurge, the cosmic 'beginning', the 'second mixing', the Receptacle and the Atlantis story. Broadie shows how Plato deploys the mythic themes of the Timaeus to convey fundamental philosophical insights and examines the profoundly differing methods of interpretation which have been brought to bear on the work. Her book is for everyone interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, cosmology and mythology, whether classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas or historians of science. It offers new findings to scholars familiar with the material, but it is also a clear and reliable resource for anyone coming to it for the first time"--

"The aim throughout is to identify certain major philosophical concerns that shape Plato's fashioning of the Timaean system. Quite often this will involve working out the implications of his not having adopted some feature or assumption of the actual account. Applying this method is not a matter of portraying Plato as psychologically deliberating between unsettled options: it is a matter of making conceptual comparisons between his actual positions and alternatives not chosen. But whereas it is mostly pointless and irrelevant to try to tap into Plato's personal psychology, it is not pointless and irrelevant to bear in mind his historical time and place in trying to reconstruct the problematic that underlies one or another portion or aspect of the Timaeus"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: What lies ahead; 1. The separateness of the demiurge; 2. Paradigms and epistemic possibilities; 3. The metaphysics of the paradigm; 4. Immortal intellect under mortal conditions; 5. The Timaeus-Critias Complex; 6. The genesis of the four elements; 7. Divine and natural causation; In conclusion.