Plato - Platos Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato

The International Library of Philosophy

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The International Library of Philosophy

PLATOS COSMOLOGY

The Timaeus of Plato
translated with a Running
Commentary

by

FRANCIS MACDONALD CORNFORD

First published 1937 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd

Published 2014 by Routledge

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1937 Francis MacDonald Cornford

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Platos Cosmology

ISBN: 978-0-415-22518-2 (hbk)

Ancient Philosophy: 10 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-22571-X

The International Library of Philosophy: 56 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-21803-9

ARMILLARY SPHERE

The globe at the centre, representing the Earth, is inscribed: Globe Terrestre. A Paris, chez Delamarche Gog; rue du Foin Jacques au Collge de Me Gervais

[frontispiece

TO
ELEANOR MEREDITH COBHAM

THIS book is constructed on the same plan as an earlier volume in the series, Platos Theory of Knowledge, It contains a translation of the Timaeus interspersed with a commentary discussing each problem of interpretationand there are many hitherto unsolvedas it arises. My first aim has been to render Platos words as closely as I can. Anyone who attempts to reproduce his exalted poetical style must face the certainty of failure, with the added risk of falsifying the sense, especially by misleading reminiscences of the English Bible. The commentary is designed to guide the reader through a long and intricate argument and to explain what must remain obscure in the most faithful translation; for the Timaeus covers an immense field at the cost of compressing the thought into the smallest space. Only with some such aid can students of theology and philosophy have access to a document which has deeply influenced mediaeval and modern speculation. I have tried not to confuse the interpretation of the text with the construction of theories of wider scope. The later Platonism is a subject on which agreement may never be reached; but there is some hope of persuading scholars that a Greek sentence means one thing rather than another.

The translation follows Burnets text, except where I have given reasons for departing from it or proposed corrections of passages that are probably or certainly corrupt. For the interpretation I have consulted, in the first instance, the commentaries of Proclus and Chalcidius, the fragment of Galens commentary lately re-edited by Schroder, the relevant treatises of Plutarch, and Theon of Smyrna, who preserves valuable extracts from Dercylides and Adrastus. The careful summary of the Timaeus in the Didascalicus of the Middle Platonist Albinus deserves more attention than it receives. Among the moderns I have drawn freely upon Martins admirable tudes sur le Time de Platon, Archer-Hinds commentary, and the translations of Apelt, Fraccaroli, Rivaud, and Professor A. E. Taylor.

More useful than any of these has been Professor Taylors Commentary, His wide learning and untiring industry have amassed a great quantity of illustrative material, and he has cleared up the meaning of many sentences hitherto misunderstood. These amendments will pass into the common stock of future editors and translators, and I have for the most part adopted them tacitly. It is unfortunate that. I should so often have had to quote his views where it was necessary to give reasons for dissent. My notes, accordingly, do not indicate the extent of a debt which I here acknowledge with gratitude.

On many of the larger questions of interpretation, however, I differ widely from Professor Taylor. He has launched in this volume a new Taylorian heresy. After confounding the persons of Socrates and Plato in earlier books, he has now divided the substance of Plato and Timaeus. All the ancient Platonists from Aristotle to Simplicius and all mediaeval and modern scholars to our own day have assumed that this dialogue contains the mature doctrine of its author. Professor Taylor holds that they have been mistaken. He writes:

It is in fact the main thesis of the present interpretation that the teaching of Timaeus can be shown to be in detail exactly what we should expect in a fifth-century Italian Pythagorean who was also a medical man, that it is, in fact, a deliberate attempt to amalgamate Pythagorean religion and mathematics with Empedoclean biology, and thus correctly represents the same tendency in fifth-century thought for which the name, e.g. of Philolaus stands in the history of philosophy. If this view is sound, it follows that it is a mistake to look in the Timaeus for any revelation of the distinctively Platonic doctrines, the as Aristotle calls them (Met. A. 987a, 31), by which Platonism is discriminated from Pythagoreanism, or for a later Platonic theory which can be set in opposition to the type of doctrine expounded in the