Of all the criticisms that Aristotle gives of his predecessors’ theories of soul in De anima I.3–5, none seems more unmotivated than the ones directed against the world soul of Plato’s Timaeus. Against the current scholarly consensus, I claim that the status of Aristotle’s criticisms is philosophical rather than eristical, and that they provide important philosophical reasons, independent of Phys. VIII.10 and Metaph. Λ.6, for believing that νοῦς is without spatial extension, and that its thinking is not a physical motion.

_ Source: _Volume 61, Issue 1, pp 43 - 59 Contemporary debate on Plato’s cosmogony often assumes that the ‘literal’ reading of the _Timaeus_ yields an account of creation, while the view that the cosmos always existed is non-literal. In antiquity, Taurus has been seen as a forerunner of the ‘non-literal’ interpretation. This paper shows, on the contrary, that Taurus’ argument for the sempiternity of the cosmos is a literalist one, relying on a strict linguistic analysis of _Timaeus_ 28b6-8.

Le mythe cosmogénétique ou cosmogonique exposé et développé par Platon dans son Timée pour faciliter la conception du monde et sa con­naissance, n’a cessé, au moins depuis Aristote, de susciter la glose. Il faut convenir que la phraséologie platonicienne, souvent ambivalente, com­pliquée par d’inévitables difficultés dans l’établissement du texte, est pro­pice à toutes sortes de confusions, amalgames, aménagements et raccour­cis, surtout lorsqu’elle fait l’objet d’un transfert linguistique. S...