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Foundational · Classical Greece

Timaeus

by Plato

Ancient Greek Philosophy (Platonism)

Timaeus is Plato's account of the origin of the cosmos, describing the visible world as a living being fashioned by a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who shapes it after an eternal and intelligible pattern. It is among the most influential of his dialogues, supplying later thought with its enduring picture of an ordered, ensouled universe.

The work seeds the perennial idea that the visible world is the image of an intelligible order held in Mind. Matter is given form according to the Forms, the perfect archetypes the craftsman contemplates, so that the cosmos becomes the sensible expression of an invisible and rational pattern. Reality is thus located in what the intellect grasps rather than in what the senses report, making consciousness the gateway to the real.

For the mind-power lineage Plato is the wellspring, and the Timaeus is the cosmological side of that legacy. Its vision of a world copied from an eternal model, and of the Good as the ultimate source, became a template for the later One of the Neoplatonists and for every doctrine in which a single creative Mind underlies and produces the manifest world.

Lineage

What it drew on
SocratesPythagorasHeraclitusParmenides
What it shaped
AristotlePlotinusProclusPhilo of AlexandriaPlutarchRenaissance Neoplatonism (Ficino)New Thought (indirectly)Ammonius Saccas

The author

Plato PlatoThe Forms Full voice →

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