Timaios

The Timaios is a late work by Plato and one of his most fascinating, but also most inaccessible dialogues. In this work, which consists largely of a long monologue by Lokroi's Timaios, Plato presents his philosophy of nature. The dialogue gradually unfolds a complete picture of the cosmos from the creation of the celestial bodies to the affairs of mankind. For Plato, the question of the origin of the world is directly linked to that of real life: The dialogue shows how intelligible structure, and thus the good, came into the perceptible world. The basic figure of the narrative is that of a teleological creation myth: the demiurge, Plato's divine world builder, brings order, structure and regularity into the world because it is good. At the end of creation there is the one characterized by harmony and proportion.