So I'm reading le Timaeus de Plato for class. For some reason Socrates ain't all up in the speakers business in this one.
Anyone got any ideas what this book is about?
>>8017574
>reading the most important book in the western canon
>literally every great mind in the western tradition has engaged with this work
>wants a 4chan answer on what it's all about
lol
the golden ratio maaaaaaaan. its like there must be higher forms n' shit
>>8019327
>instead he got this response
sad
>>8019489
I assumed OP was trolling. I mean, in what class, other than an advanced Plato seminar or high level Greek, do you actually read Timaeus? It's not a text that one usually approaches through academia without some prior exposure to Plato.
>>8019526
Have you read it?
>>8019468
faggot
>>8017574
Reading the Republic first helps. It's essentially an explication of Platonic physics and metaphysics, starting from the most general and fundamental causal agent of creation down to the very physiology of the individual.
>>8019703
I've spent a lot of time with the Timaeus, in English and in Greek. >>8019709 is the basic gist of it. It's basically Plato's attempt to formulate a satisfactory cosmogenesis/cosmology which accounts for the involvement of mind in the material world.
Plato was immersed in the cosmologies of people like Democritus, Empedocles, and Thales - all of whom painted a mechanistic picture of the cosmos as the transformation of some material substrate (atoms, 4 elements, water, etc.) For Plato none of these things successfully accounted for Mind or soul in the world.
In the Phaedo, Plato relates that eventually this guy Anaxagoras came along, and he wrote this book that was all about how the mind was interpenetrated with the cosmos, so Plato was super excited to read it. But when he actually did read it, he saw that Anaxagoras had basically said "in the beginning there was Mind, and it set the universe in motion." So in Anaxagoras' work, the first moment of creation was something caused by Mind, but the rest of the work is just devoted to the mechanics of the system which the mind created.
In Timaeus, Plato is attempting to do what he thought Anaxagoras was about - to create a cosmogenesis/cosmology in which mind is present at every level, and the world as it is is the best world that could have been created.
If you actually look at the work, only the first third is devoted to the cosmos, however, with the latter two-thirds being about anthropology and physiology.
Timaeus was the bedrock of all later Academic dogmatics. It was central to the Old Academy, but increasingly peripheral during the Middle and New Academies, which developed a more thoroughgoing skepticism, anathema to late Plato's cosmological thinking.
It became important again with the Middle Platonists, who began the project of Hellenistic snycretism wherein they read foreign mythologies in a Platonic (more often than not Timaeus-inflected) light. I'm talking about Philo of Alexandria, who did that with the Septuagint, and Plutarch of Chaeronea who did it with traditional Greek and Egyptian mythologies.
Shortly after the Middle Platonic flowering of Platonic dogmatics, and simultaneous with the New Academy, Cicero translated the Timaeus into Latin. It was the only of Plato's texts which would live on in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages - hence its centrality to the western canon.
Again, in Neoplatonism Timaeus was hugely important. Not so much in Plotinus himself, but in second generation Neoplatonism of Porphyry, and the Syrian Neoplatonism of Iamblichus and Damascius, the Timaeus was mined for philosophical content with an allegorical lens.
Mind you by this point we're 700 years from Plato's time - these late antique/early medieval neoplatonists were completely obsessed with Plato's philosophy, and literally pondered every single word in the Platonic corpus.
>>8020424
So basically, skip this one?
>>8019468
STOTLE SHILL DETECTED
>>8017574
Socrates doesn't interfere with the speaker because it's not meant principally to be a dialogue seeking truth, but an explanation and exposition of supposedly known truths, similar to a textbook.
>"This is the being of the Universe. This is physics. This is meta-physics. This is medicine."
It's quite beautiful, actually. Additionally, it's remarkable how close they got to understood scientific reality on a number of points, like the behavior of the optic nerve and eye, that elements are composed of small 'indivisible' parts, solutes vs solids.
9.5/10 book overall, I'm very likely to reread it. Critias, less so. Fuck Atlantis.
