Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus

Plato's Timaeus is one of the most influential and challenging works of ancient philosophy to have come down to us. Sarah Broadie's rich and compelling study proposes new interpretations of major elements of the Timaeus, including the separate Demiurge, the cosmic 'beginning', the 'second mixing', the Receptacle and the Atlantis story. Broadie shows how Plato deploys the mythic themes of the Timaeus to convey fundamental philosophical insights and examines the profoundly differing methods of interpretation which have been brought to bear on the work. Her book is for everyone interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, cosmology and mythology, whether classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas or historians of science. It offers new findings to scholars familiar with the material, but it is also a clear and reliable resource for anyone coming to it for the first time.

Sarah Broadie is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Ethics with Aristotle (1991) and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2002), and (as Sarah Waterlow) of Passage and Possibility: A Study of Aristotle's Modal Concepts (1984) and Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle's Physics: A Philosophical Study (1984).