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Timaeus suggests that since nothing "becomes or changes" without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or a god, a figure Timaeus refers to as the father and maker of the universe. And since the universe is fair, the demiurge must have looked to the eternal model to make it, and not to the perishable one (29a).
Plato, as the speaker Timaeus, refers to the Demiurge frequently in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus (28a ff.), c. 360 BC. The main character refers to the Demiurge as the entity who "fashioned and shaped" the material world. Timaeus describes the Demiurge as unreservedly benevolent, and so it desires a world as good as possible. The result of his ...
In ancient philosophy, Plato's dialogue Timaeus introduces the universe as a living creature endowed with a soul and reason, constructed by the demiurge according to a rational pattern expressed through mathematical principles. Plato describes the world soul as a mixture of sameness and difference, forming a unified, harmonious entity that ...
In Timaeus, Plato posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the Cosmos. Aristotle argued against the idea of a first cause, often confused with the idea of a "prime mover" or " unmoved mover " ( πρῶτον κινοῦν ἀκίνητον or primus motor ) in his Physics and Metaphysics . [ 8 ]
4th century BCE – Plato claimed in his Timaeus that circles and spheres are the preferred shape of the universe, that the Earth is at the center and is circled by, ordered in-to-outwards: Moon, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and finally the fixed stars located on the celestial sphere. [16]
Plato advocates a belief in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. In the Timaeus, Socrates locates the parts of the soul within the human body: Reason is located in the head, spirit in the top third of the torso, and the appetite in the middle third of the torso, down to the navel ...
After Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides all held that the universe was spherical. [10] And much later in the fourth century BC Plato's Timaeus proposed that the body of the cosmos was made in the most perfect and uniform shape, that of a sphere containing the fixed stars. [11]
Plato tended to treat nous as the only immortal part of the soul. Concerning the cosmos, in the Timaeus , the title character also tells a "likely story" in which nous is responsible for the creative work of the demiurge or maker who brought rational order to our universe.