Compare Works

Timaeus

The most quoted Timaean phrase — "time, then, came into being with the heavens" (38b) — makes time itself a created feature of the cosmos, distinct from the eternal being of the Forms. Time is finite (having a beginning at creation), continuous, and emergent from a more fundamental eternity. The famous formula: time is "the moving image of eternity, proceeding according to number" (37d).

Timaeus

The receptacle (chōra) is the closest the Timaeus comes to a theory of space — neither Form nor body, but "the third kind" (48e–52d), the medium in which becoming takes place. Space is finite, three-dimensional, and substantival in the sense of existing as the receptacle prior to the geometric ordering. The cosmos as a whole is a finite sphere.

Timaeus

Matter is constructed: the Demiurge orders the chaotic receptacle into the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), each composed of one of the regular solids (cube, icosahedron, octahedron, tetrahedron). Matter is emergent from formal-geometric structure, finite in quantity, and conserved through transformations among the elements (53c–57c).

Timaeus

Two observers in the Timaeus. The Demiurge — singular, personal, rational, active, and good — looks to the Forms and shapes the cosmos. Embodied human observers are plural, both embodied and soul-disembodied (the soul precedes the body, joins it at birth, and may leave), and active in the cultivation of reason. Knowledge is total in principle (the soul has seen the Forms) but immediate in the embodied condition (we must reason our way back to what we have forgotten). The metaphysical agency is personal: the Demiurge is a craftsman, not an impersonal principle.

Timaeus

The World-Soul is the energetic intermediate between the eternal Forms and the temporal cosmos — that which moves itself and thereby moves everything else (34c–36d). It is substantival (genuinely a thing the Demiurge constructed), conserved across its proper motions, and operates in irreversible cycles within the cosmic year.

Timaeus

The Forms supply the informational structure that the Demiurge imposes on the receptacle. Information is substantival, conserved across the cosmos' history, and continuous (the harmonic ratios are real numerical structures, not bit-quantised). Personal information is conserved across embodiments — the soul that has lived a just life returns to "its native star" (42b); the unjust is reincarnated lower.