Abstract

In Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert looks at Plato’s Timaeus with fresh eyes, implicitly reviving the thesis of A. E. Taylor that Timaeus does not speak for Plato. Taylor devoted his scrupulous 1927 commentary to making this case but it ran aground on the question about Plato posed ten years later by F. M. Cornford in Plato’s Cosmology (viii): “What could have been his motive?” Plato’s motive was both pedagogical and Parmenidean: just as the Goddess exposes the seeker to “the Way of Opinion” after the revelation of “Truth,” so also does Plato’s Timaeus expose the reader to a poetic account of a sight-based cosmology—another kosmo/j e0pe/wn a0pathlo/j (Parmenides B8.52)—after the revelation of exclusively intelligible Platonic ontology in Republic V-VII.

Keywords: Plato, Timaeus, Parmenidean pedagogy.