Aristotle's conception of theoria represents a distinct departure from his predecessors. Aristotle explicitly refers to traditional theoria in discussing philosophic contemplation, but he uses only some of its standard features. In particular, he retains the idea that theoria involves detachment from practical affairs and “seeing” something divine and true. But he dispenses with the notion of a round-trip journey abroad. As we will see, he compares the philosopher to a theoros who goes to a festival simply for the sake of seeing the spectacle.

Plato offers a detailed discussion of philosophic theoria in the Republic books v–vii. He locates this discussion in the context of a conversation between quite specific characters, one of whom has dedicated his life to the search for wisdom. As in all his dialogues, Plato places the specificity of the characters in a dialogical relation to the general and abstract ideas under discussion. The drama of the dialogue, in short, corroborates but also complicates the issues set forth in the arguments and myths. This drama features characters in a particular historical context engaging in philosophical discussions on various topics. In the dialogue as a whole, the characters' lives and personalities enrich and illuminate the intellectual arguments. In the Republic and other dialogues dealing with theoria, Socrates' highly idiosyncratic persona affects our interpretation of the text and its account of theorizing.

One of the basic puzzles of the Timaeus-Critias concerns the thematic unity of the dialogue. Why is the bulk of the dialogue taken up with a discussion of natural philosophy when it apparently sets out simply to give an account of a war between Atlantis and ancient Athens? What, if anything, does natural philosophy have to do with war?

The Timaeus-Critias is presented as a continuation of the Republic. Socrates begins by reporting a conversation he had yesterday, in which he described a constitution (politeia) which in outline matches that of the Republic. He now expects his listeners from yesterday to repay him in kind. Here is what he wants:

At the beginning of the Timaeus-Critias Socrates likened himself to a spectator wishing to observe beautiful animals in motion. At the end of the work the world and its denizens have been shown to be just that. The cosmos itself is a beautiful animal moving in time and space and it is composed of animals, planets, humans, and other animals, whose design displays the greatest possible rationality. Even the city and its actions can be understood by its place within the greater cosmic order. As readers we are placed in the position of observers of a cosmos which, like that famously presented on the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18 and reconstructed on the cover of this book, invites us to understand our role as human beings and citizens by inclusion in a world order. If this is the world we live in, if this is how nature works, then we should arrange our lives accordingly. The Timaeus-Critias coaxes us into adopting an ordered life, not by knockdown argument, but by showing our place in a picture. It is the detail and completeness of this picture that draw us in. Cosmology plays an important role here particularly for those of us who have not been brought up in a well-ordered city and who therefore lack first-hand experience of paradigms of good order.

Chapter 1 argued that the connection between the Atlantis story and Timaeus' cosmology lies in teleology. Nature in general and human nature in particular are geared towards the good. We acted against nature if we chose a life of injustice and could expect to suffer for it, whilst a life of justice would be rewarded with happiness in this life as in the afterlife. In chapter 2 I considered the Atlantis story and argued that it is a story about the actions of good men, of the sort envisaged by the Republic. We were warned not to take the story as a historical representation, but as a true story in the sense that it correctly represents how good people would prevail in war.

In this chapter I turn to the status of Timaeus' account. Timaeus famously describes the status of his account as an eikōs muthos or as an eikōs logos, that is, as a likely story or myth or as a likely account. This description occurs as the conclusion of the methodological passage at the beginning of Timaeus' speech. Timaeus will later litter his account with reminders that his account is likely. There is therefore no doubt that he means us to pay close attention to this passage. This chapter focuses on the two major questions we face when assessing the status of Timaeus' account. What does he mean by calling his account ‘likely’ and why does he call it alternately a likely muthos and a likely logos?

For Timaeus, as we saw in the last chapter, the world is a product of craftsmanship. However, craftsmanship is not the only cause of the cosmos. Another is ‘necessity’. The introduction of this cause occasions Timaeus to make a fresh beginning to his cosmology at 47e3–48b3:

It should perhaps come as no surprise to us that the demiurge needed another principle apart from reason when he fashioned the universe.

I start with Cornford's diagnosis of Plato's view of the perceptible world and perception. Cornford reacted with justification against Taylor's assimilation of Timaeus to a modern positivistic view of science. Taylor had suggested that the status of our accounts of the natural world as merely likely could ultimately be overcome with the progress of empirical science. The Timaeus story was for Taylor a myth only ‘in the sense that it is the nearest approximation which can “provisionally” be made to exact truth’.Cornford was surely right to object that our accounts could in principle only ever be likely in so far as they are accounts of a likeness.

Cornford's and Taylor's positions are contraries but not contradictories. For whilst mutually exclusive, they are not jointly exhaustive. Whilst Taylor gives too much to perception, I want to argue that Cornford gives too little. In natural philosophy perception stands in a complex interactive relationship with reason. It is the aim of this chapter to analyse this relationship.

From the Phaedo we are familiar with the view of the body as a sort of prison for the soul. The body disrupts the proper workings of the soul, giving rise to irrationality in an essentially rational immortal soul. Embodiment is represented as a punishment for the soul. As Socrates puts it, ‘the philosopher's soul utterly despises his body and flees from it, seeking to be alone by itself’ (65d).

If this is our only impression of Plato's view of the relationship between the body and the soul, then reading the Timaeus may come as a surprise. For, as I aim to show, the dialogue offers a more complex and often more constructive view of the role of the body and the contribution it may make to our rationality and happiness. This view is based, I shall argue, on a detailed teleological account of the body and its relationship to the soul. I hope to show that readers of Plato who ignore the Timaeus risk getting a seriously incomplete picture of his thought on soul and body. This applies particularly to our understanding of the origin of the tripartite soul and the nature of soul–body interaction, where it might be argued that the Timaeus offers the most developed account of any Platonic dialogue.

The argument proceeds as follows. I start by sketching the composition of the world soul according to Timaeus. This is the necessary starting-point since the human soul has its origin in the world soul.

The last chapter argued that necessity arose out of the nature of the simple bodies in conjunction with the receptacle. The receptacle played an important role in accounting for the necessary motions, particularly in explaining why bodies with like natures move towards each other. However, it would be a mistake to think of necessity as simply emerging out of the receptacle as such. For, I argued, the pre-cosmic receptacle does not on its own support the notion of necessity. This chapter considers Timaeus' account of the receptacle in more detail. In the process, it should become clearer how Timaeus distinguishes the states of the receptacle after and before the creation of the cosmos and thus how he sees the difference between a world that is governed by teleology and one that is not.

At 48e Timaeus says that you need three basic principles to explain the cosmos. Two of these, the notions of being and becoming, we are already familiar with from the beginning of this dialogue and from other Platonic dialogues. But now Timaeus adds a third principle, that of the receptacle of coming-into-being. What exactly Timaeus means by the receptacle has been debated since antiquity. Does he mean the matter out of which physical things are composed, as Aristotle suggested? Or does he mean the space in which physical objects are located? Timaeus himself calls the receptacle ‘space’ (chōra), but never ‘matter’ (hulē). However, this fact hardly settles the question.

Does the universe support our moral endeavours? Does the world, as we know it, give us reason to think that we will be better off, happier, more thriving, if we pursue a course of moral probity than if we do not? Does the universe make us feel at home as moral agents? Does goodness or beauty figure in the world independently of us? Can we learn something about how to live our lives from observing the universe? Many today would agree with Jacques Monod in answering ‘no’ to all of these questions. We live in an ‘unfeeling’ universe. The world is insensitive to our moral concerns. Values are mere human ‘constructs’, which the universe at best is indifferent to and at worst undermines.

Reading Plato we are brought back to a world in which the ‘ancient covenant’, the moral agreement between man and the universe, still holds. It is a tenet of Plato's thought that man is not alone in the universe with his moral concerns. Goodness is represented in the universe. We can therefore learn something about goodness by studying the cosmos. Cosmology teaches us how to lead our lives.

It is common to distinguish between two kinds of teleological account. One kind explains an outcome as the result of intentional agency. In this sense I might explain why I went to the circus by saying that I wanted to have fun. Another kind of teleological explanation does without intentions and posits goals without reference to thoughts or other intentional states. Aristotle's natural teleology is normally taken as an example of the latter, unintentional sort. In contrast, Plato's cosmology in the Timaeus is, with good reason, taken as an example of the intentional sort of teleology, or ‘unnatural’ teleology as James Lennox has called it.So at the beginning of his account Timaeus tells us that the cosmos was created by a craftsman, a ‘demiurge’ (Greek, dēmiourgos), who wanted to make the world as good and beautiful as possible (30a2–3). Throughout his account Timaeus reminds us that the demiurge made this or that feature of the cosmos as well as he could or that he made it in order that such-and-such an end should come about. The aim of this chapter is to examine the role of the demiurge in the creation of the cosmos in the light of this contrast between natural and unnatural teleology. I shall first consider Timaeus' reasons for introducing the demiurge. I then look at and reject some ways in which one might try to dispense with the demiurge when interpreting the Timaeus.

The Timaeus-Critias, like Plato's other works, is commonly referred to as a dialogue. Yet from 29d6 to the end, that is to say for about five-sixths of the text, the Timaeus takes the form of a monologue, and roughly the same holds for the Critias. There are other Platonic dialogues which contain long, uninterrupted speeches, for example, the Apology and the Laws. Yet there is, with the possible exception of the Menexenus, no other work that to such an extent is dominated by monologue. What has happened to the dialogue form in the Timaeus-Critias? In what sense, if any, can we call this work a ‘dialogue’? And if Plato has given up on the dialogue form in the Timaeus-Critias, how does this reflect on the sorts of inquiry that Timaeus and Critias are engaged in? We tend to think of Plato's method of philosophy as dialectical, at least in the minimal sense of involving questions and answers. Has Plato then changed his conception of philosophy in this work, and if so, why in this work?

DIALOGUE

One can talk about at least four kinds of dialogue in Plato, and no doubt there are more. There is the dialogue between the characters within the works. So, for example, Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo. There is also the dialogue between the narrator of such conversations and his audience.

In chapter 1 I considered the aim of the dialogue as a whole and the connections between the Atlantis story and Timaeus' account of the cosmos. In this chapter I try to answer the question about the status of the Atlantis story as ‘history’ or ‘fiction’. In the next chapter I go on to investigate the status of Timaeus' account.

From antiquity on, the status of Critias' account has been the subject of intense debate. Are we as readers supposed to take the Atlantis story as ‘real history’? The dialogue invites us to raise this question but also to reflect on its terms. In this chapter I argue that the story should be seen as ‘history’ only in a special Platonic sense: it is a story which is fabricated about the past in order to reflect a general truth about how ideal citizens would fare in war. The story thereby provides a practical example of how virtue, understood along the lines of the Republic, would prevail in this world even in the most adverse of conditions.

As we have seen, the Timaeus-Critias tells two stories. One is an account of the war between ancient Athens and Atlantis; the other is an account of the creation of the kosmos and everything in it. Critias and Timaeus tell their stories in response to Socrates' request to be entertained in return for the entertainment he provided yesterday, which was an account of an ideal city very similar to that of the Republic.

Stoicism remains one of the most significant minority reports in the history of Western philosophy. Unfortunately, however, the precise nature of its impact on later thinkers is far from clear. The essays in this volume are intended to bring this picture into sharper focus by exploring how Stoicism actually influenced philosophers from antiquity through the modern period in fields ranging from logic and ethics to politics and theology. The contributing authors have expertise in different periods in the history of philosophy, but all have sought to demonstrate the continuity of Stoic themes over time, looking at the ways in which Stoic ideas were appropriated (often unconsciously) and transformed by later philosophers for their own purposes and under widely varying circumstances. The story they tell shows that Stoicism had many faces beyond antiquity, and that its doctrines have continued to appeal to philosophers of many different backgrounds and temperaments.

In tracing the influence of Stoicism on Western thought, one can take either the high road or the low road. The high road would insist on determining the ancient provenance of Stoic and apparently Stoic ideas in the work of medieval and modern thinkers, using the writings of the ancient Stoics to grade their proximity to the genuine article; this would require paying close attention to the particular questions that exercised thinkers such as Zeno and Chrysippus, in order to determine the extent to which later figures contributed to their solutions.