Big D little d - The Demiurge God in Plato's Timaeus (original) (raw)

“Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created…Was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning, or created, and had it a beginning?” --Timaeus 28b This introductory question spawns a whole dialogue devoted to the creation of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus. Causality and purpose, not in the modern logical sense, underpins one of Plato’s final accounts of cosmology in his dialogues. Many readers of Plato find it unusual that Plato would develop a teleologically theistic cosmology when, as Aristotle remarks in his Metaphysics, Socrates was more concerned about ethics. Knowledge and truth underlies Plato’s view of the world in his famous doctrine of the forms or ideas, and these are mirrored in the material world of becoming to be discovered through dialectic. Plato attempted to grasp the metaphysical through many different avenues and theology was one of them. Theology in Plato’s dialogues generates a lot criticism from modern interpreters, and non more so than the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus. The goal of this paper is to present and analyze Plato’s presentation of the creator of the universe or the Demiurge in his dialogue the Timaeus and then argue for his transcendence. Our first focus will be the rudiments of Plato’s cosmology as offered in the Timaeus, then the creator Demiurge itself, and conclude with some comparisons from other dialogues as well as some reflections.