has been considerable debate concerning Plato’s actual
thoughts. This is exacerbated by the fact that Plato does
not appear to write to record his own doctrines, but to
engage in or illustrate the nature of philosophical debate,
or perhaps even to provoke his readers to examine their
own opinions. The order of his works and the possible
development of his thought are also areas of contention.
The consensus on groupings of early, middle and later
works is broad, but the position and significance of indi-
vidual works can still be hotly contested. The key work
for Plato’s views on natural science is the Timaeus, now
generally agreed to be late, but its relation to other late
works and to the development of Plato’s thought is
unclear. Sources for Plato’s biography include D
L, whose own sources vary in reliability, and
A, Plato’s pupil. Some letters in Plato’s name
give interesting information, but their provenance is open
to considerable doubt.
Plato gives us the first thoroughgoing teleological
account of the kosmos, its formation and the origins of humans and animals in the
Timaeus. This work was hugely influential in astronomy and cosmology, and significantly
affected attitudes to explanation down to the 17th c. Why does Plato adopt this teleology?
Plato’s critics argue that his motivation here is some sort of overspill from his programs in
ethics and epistemology, both dominated by an absolute conception of the good. They
argue this was a reaction against materialist science preceding Plato, and had a malign effect
on subsequent thought.
Plato found contemporary materialist explanations crude, implausible and inadequate, a
reasonable conclusion given the lack of sophistication of these accounts at this stage of their
development. His alternative was to postulate a craftsman God, the demiurge, who organ-
ized all things out of chaos, always with the best arrangement in mind. Where L
and D had an unlimited number of worlds occurring by accident, an unlimited
number of sizes and shapes of atoms, and E had a multiplicity of biological
accidents before viable species are formed, Plato was adamant that there was one
well-designed kosmos, a small number of well-designed basic particles and unitary, well-
designed species.
That Plato criticized many theories of Pre-Socratic phusiologoi is sometimes taken as
evidence of a negative attitude towards natural science. Here it is important to distinguish
between Plato’s attitude to the phusiologoi and his own conception of how natural phenom-
ena should be explained. When he is critical of materialist accounts of So ̄crate ̄s remaining
in jail, or why the Earth has its shape and position, or why one person is taller than another,
it is not that he believes these issues are not worthy of investigation, but rather that material-
ist accounts of these issues are inadequate, either because they do not refer to the good, and
so are not teleological in the sense required, or do not refer to Plato’s forms.
Plato contrasted his unchanging, intelligible, knowable forms with the changing, per-
ceptible physical world, the subject of opinion only. Modern interpretations of Plato
downplay the extent to which these should be seen as two separate worlds and emphasize
Plato © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
PLATO