It is now nearly axiomatic among Platonic scholars that the Timaeus and its unfinished sequel the Critias belong to the last stage of Plato's writings. The Laws is generally held to be wholly or partly a later production. So, by many, is the Philebus, but that is all. Perhaps the privileged status of the Timaeus in the Middle Ages helped to fix the conviction that it embodies Plato's maturest theories.

AT the beginning of the third part of the Theaetetus , Socrates entertains an interesting theory of knowledge in the form of a ‘dream’. In Cornford's translation, it reads as follows: I seem to have heard some people say that what might be called the first elements () of which we and all other things consist are such that no account () can be given of them. Each of them just by itself can only be named; we cannot attribute to (...) it anything further or say that it exists or does not exist; for we should at once be attaching to it existence or nonexistence, whereas we ought to add nothing if we are to express just it alone. We ought not even to add ‘just’ or ‘it’ or ‘each’ or ‘alone’ or ‘this’, or any other of a host of such terms. (shrink)

This paper has two main aims: first, to set forth an analysis of Timaeus 48E-52D and then to explore the significance of those pages for our understanding of Plato’s metaphysics. Students of the “Receptacle” in Plato’s Timaeus have given close attention to the many metaphors he offers in his explanation of its nature. Less attention has been given to the overall structure of the passage in which he presents it. In this paper, I attempt to show that Plato’s exposition there (...) exhibits a coherent and very careful design. But once that design is grasped, it can be seen that his extended account of the Receptacle must properly be understood to treat a rather different subject: the nature of an image, rather than the nature of the Receptacle, is the focal concern uniting the whole of 48E-52D. (shrink)

The complete, or almost complete, absence from the Theaetetus of any unequivocal reference to Platonic Forms is a problem, the solution of which appeared to many scholars to have been found and convincingly presented in the late Professor Gornford's book Plato's Theory of Knowledge, published in 1935. Put briefly, his contention was that the main purpose of the dialogue is to show that no acceptable definition of knowledge can be reached if the Forms are left out of account, that there (...) are a number of passages in which any reader of the middle dialogues would see that they were deliberately being left out of account, and one or two, namely in the famous digression on the philosophic life, and in the discussion of ‘common terms’ , where they are actually brought in, though not indeed under the name of. (shrink)