This paper aims to show that the Middle Platonists’ appeal to the Timaeus was grounded in a complex and effective philosophical reasoning: the Middle Platonists conceived of Plato’s text as a web of passages which Plato himself had carefully established. Only a few of them were granted a qualified priority, namely, those offering a complete and comprehensive philosophical account of the key elements which the Platonists regarded as fundamental. This will allow us to show that the Middle Platonists’ preference for (...) the Timaeus does not depend on the fact that it is systematic. Rather it is systematic insofar as it proves capable of giving context to passages from other dialogues and provides them with an account that is philosophically sound. (shrink)

It is a well-established opinion in the literature that the immediate circle of Plato’s disciples maintained that the generation of the cosmos described in the Timaeus was to be understood as an illustrative, or educational metaphor. On this account, Plato’s students were the first to hold an eternalist, metaphorical reading of the generation of the world, challenged by the Peripatos. When criticising their position in the De Caelo, however, Aristotle describes Early Academic philosophers as holding the more nuanced view that (...) the world is ‘indestructible and yet generated’ (ἄφθαρτον μὲν […] γενόμενον δέ). Is it possible to make any sense of this formulation and restore a different position for Early Academic philosophers? In this paper, I claim that the standard reading can be challenged and that there is ground to believe that Speusippus and Xenocrates held that the world is generated but everlasting. What they denied having happened in time and said should be understood as an illustrative metaphor is the transition from the absence of an order to order or, in other words, the cosmogonic process itself. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.