Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, Likely Story, Plato's Timaeus.

Imagine if you will that you're a medieval monk in a well-stocked library.

It's the 11th century A.D. One day you go to the shelf where Playdoes writings are kept and find there a single volume.

You open it and begin to read.

You aren't going to be reading the republic because it hasn't been translated into Latin,

nor are you reading the Fido or the Mino, neither of which will be available in Latin until the middle of the 12th century.

The platonic corpus has fortunately been preserved and studied in the Greek-speaking medieval Byzantine Empire.

Its rediscovery in Western Europe, where Latin is still the language of scholars, will help spark

the Renaissance, but that's still centuries away.

So what you are reading represents the complete works of Plato as they are known in your time and place,

an incomplete Latin translation of a single dialogue, the Timaeus.

Although Plato is hardly more than a name to you, the themes of this work will interest

you greatly as you leave through its pages.

For it is in the Timaeus that Plato presents his thoughts on the creation of the world

and the providential order of the universe, topics that are close to your heart,

since you are a medieval monk.

In the Timaeus, you discover what Plato has to say about God.

But Plato's God is rather different than the God of medieval monks.

We can tell this already from the way Plato refers to him.

Although it is made clear that we are dealing with a God, Plato also calls him a craftsman, in Greek Demiorgos.

This so-called Demiurge has two things in common with human craftsmen,

...