Plato’s God as Father of the Cosmos

Plato’s God as Father of the Cosmos George Boys-Stones University of Toronto Published in Greek translation (by Xanthippe Bourloyanni) as Ὁ Πλατωνικὸς θεὸς ὡς πατέρας τοῦ κόσμου, Φιλοσοφία, 49.2 (2020), 75-87. 1. Introduction In his account of how things came to be, Timaeus describes the first cause of the cosmos as its ‘maker and father’: ποιητὴν καὶ πατέρα τοῦδε τοῦ παντός (Timaeus 28c 1).1 He apparently means god to be both an agent who plans and builds the cosmos out of the available material as a ‘craftsman’ might (he is δημιουργός already at 28a), and also a self-replicating being who finds the right conditions for procreation in the ‘receptacle’ (‘mother’ to his ‘father’ at 50d and 51a).2 Yet very little attention is in fact given, at least by modern commentators, to the second of these claims, that god is the father of the world.3 The ‘craftsman’ metaphor has been endlessly and minutely studied; but one has to go a long way to find any more than a passing acknowledgement of the claim that god is ‘father’ in the literature. One reason for this might be a sense that the ‘biological’ language in the Timaeus is only there at all because it flows in more or less unbidden from the mythological past. What is distinctive about Plato is his development of a systematic account of teleological design in the development of the cosmos: so that while both ‘craftsman’ and ‘father’ are of course metaphors when applies to god, the former is at least a living metaphor; the latter is a Hesiodic cliché.4 Even if Plato did associate being a father with specific causal activity, there is no reason to suppose that he would have thought of it as anything other than a kind of craftsmanship himself – as for example Aristotle does. (Aristotle thinks that the male ‘seed’ he says is a sort of carpenter, τέκτων, who works with the material, ὕλη, to At 28b we are told that the ‘cosmos’ is just another name for this ‘whole’, i.e. ‘the whole heaven’ (ὁ . . . πᾶς οὐρανὸς). 1 The language of fatherhood and of the ‘begetting’ (γεννᾶν) of the cosmos recurs throughout the narrative: e.g. 32c, 34a, b, 37c, 37a, d, 41a, 48a, 50d, 68e. (Timaeus is less interested in the idea of motherhood: the receptacle, which plays a purely enabling and auxiliary role in creation is also a mere ‘wet-nurse’, τιθήνη: already at 49d; also 52d, 88d.) It I worth adding (and I thank Anna Tatsi for point this out to me) that god is ‘craftsman and father’ elsewhere in Plato as well: for example, at Statesman 273c (τοῦ δημιουργοῦ καὶ πατρὸς). 2 For example, neither Cornford 1937, nor more recently Broadie 2011, have any commentary on the ‘father’ metaphor. Johansen 2004, 81-2 is motivated to engage with it only to help explain the absence of the ‘craftsman’ in 50c-d. Vorwerk 2010 is an exception – although his conclusion, that god is ‘father’ to the world soul but ‘maker’ of its body, does not pretend to add to our comprehension of Plato’s metaphysics (and may also be taken to stumble on 32c, where the cosmic body is ‘begotten’). The ancients were much more concerned to give full weight to both metaphors (and it is no coincidence that Vorwerk’s article is formally a study of the ancient commentary tradition): see for example Proclus, On the Timaeus i. 299.10-310.2 Diehl (ad 28c). 3 4 Cf. Solmsen 1963; O’Meara 2017, 32. 1 be found it the mother’s womb: GA 1.22.) Plutarch certainly seems to have taken him this way: discussing this very passage of the Timaeus, in which Plato calls god ‘maker and father’ of everything, Plutarch notes that begetting is not only analogous to ‘making’, it is in fact a species of ‘making’: ‘For what is begotten has been made as well – but not vice versa’.5 But in this case, of course, calling god the world’s ‘father’ adds nothing of explanatory interest to calling him its craftsman. The point of the language, if it has any point at all, is axiological rather than metaphysical: it is there to remind relationship and relative dignity of god and the world, but does nothing to help us understand how he brought it into being or what kind of creation it is. In this paper, I want to make the case that this is a mistake: that Plato has something quite specific in mind when he calls god the world’s father, and something that bears directly on its aetiology. I want to convince you that it not only makes a difference that god is the world’s father, but that it is crucial for understanding its causal principles as they are traced in the Timaeus; it is crucial to understanding its character as a unified living organism; and it is crucial to understanding purpose and value – which in turn matters when it comes to think of our own relationship to it. 2. Begetting as a Distinct Mode of Making Let us allow to begin with that ‘making’ is, as Plutarch suggests, a superordinate activity to fathering – i.e. that there are no causal operations that are available to a father that are not in principle available to a craftsman. But what does distinguish a father from other species of craftsman? One might be that a father, unlike most craftsmen, always uses himself as the model for his creation, and aims to make something that is like himself. But this does not get us very far – after all, other types of craftsman make self-portraits too (and some will say that their art is always an ‘expression of themselves’). A more substantial difference, then, is that a father will not expect to be responsible for ‘completing’ his work, but rather will do everything he can to give his work the creative agency to complete itself. Indeed, typically a father does nothing at all more than necessary to give his work the creative agency to complete itself – to the extent indeed that what there is to be seen in the workshop of the child when the father puts down his tools would be completely unrecognisable to most people as a human being at all. It is the fact of its own self-creation (‘growth’) that distinguishes an animal from the sort of thing that someone might make qua carpenter – and is arguably what gives it is identity as an autonomous and agential being. The divine maker of the Timaeus of course does set out to make something that is like himself, as like himself as possible.6 But the significance of the transfer of creative responsibility from QPlat 2, 1001A: ὡς γὰρ τὸ γεγεννημένον καὶ πεποίηται, οὐ μὴν ἀνάπαλιν, οὕτως ὁ γεννήσας καὶ πεποίηκεν. This is not the end of the story for Plutarch, though: see Boys-Stones forthcoming, where I argue that the reading of Plato I argue for here was common among Middle Platonists, including Plutarch. 5 29e3: πάντα ὅτι μάλιστα ἐβουλήθη γενέσθαι παραπλήσια ἑαυτῷ. At 28a, we were told that he ‘looks off’ to a paradigm for the cosmos that sounds like it likes outside of himself (πρὸς τὸ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχον βλέπων ἀεί) – and indeed this is a line which has been alleged in support of the priority of the craftsmanship model in Timaeus’ 6 2 the maker to his product that is what we really miss when we overlook the fact that the maker is also a father. For god in the Timaeus precisely does leave the workshop before the cosmos is completed. Indeed, he does as little as he possibly can towards producing the cosmos before he leaves it to continue the process on its own: just like a father, he steps back as soon as he has engineered in matter a soul capable of taking the process forward on its own. This is no incidental feature of Timaeus’ account. In fact it is such a conspicuous and important feature of the process that it is marked by an impressive speech put into the mouth of god himself – who even begins by reminding his embryonic creation that he is the sort of creator that a father is, presumably as the preamble to his explanation for why he is not going to take the work forward himself (Timaeus 41a-d, after Zeyl): ‘O gods, works divine whose craftsman and father I am,7 whatever has come to be by my hands cannot be undone but by my consent. . . There remain still three kinds of mortal beings that have not yet been begotten; and as long as they have not come to be, the universe will be incomplete, for it will still lack within it all the kinds of living things it must have if it is to be sufficiently complete. But if these creatures came to be and came to share in life by my hand, they would rival the gods. It is you, then, who must turn yourselves to the task of fashioning these living things, as your nature allows. This will assure their mortality, and this whole universe will really be a whole. Imitate the power I used in causing you to be. And to the extent that it is fitting for them to possess something that shares our name of “immortal” . . . I shall begin by sowing that seed, and then hand it over to you. The rest of the task is yours.’ To repeat, the maker here announces that he has organised things so that his matter is imbued with powers capable of taking on the creative work for themselves, and of seeing it through to ‘completion’ (from ‘incompletion’) – or, what it might not be too much of a stretch to translate as ‘maturity’ (from ‘immaturity’) (τέλεος / ἀτελής). With one final act of ‘insemination’ – of the souls to inhabit the stars, but ultimately for the animation of mortal bodies – the maker definitively ‘hands over’ to the lesser gods (“σπείρας καὶ ὑπαρξάμενος ἐγὼ παραδώσω”). He leaves the rest to them (“τὸ δὲ λοιπὸν ὑμεῖς”). Both the continuity and the break here are mirrored at the level of the narrative structure, as Timaeus, who up to this point had been giving a ‘likely account’ of the work of the maker (29d), now starts to account. But if the two passages are to be reconciled, it may be that the demiurge is identical with the paradigm he looks to. (At 50d, conversely, the forms are themselves are referred to as the ‘father’ of the cosmos!) In further affirmation of the biological model, this paradigm is subsequently revealed indeed to be the most perfect animal: 39e. That god is (craftsman and) father (δημιουργὸς πατήρ τε) of the created gods as well as of the cosmos in which they are realised is of course no contradiction, especially if we think of the world soul and created gods as features of the cosmos as a whole (and the only characterising features it has at this stage), rather than alien infusions into it. 7 3 describe the reasons and plans of the created gods (δι’ ἅς τε αἰτίας καὶ προνοίας, 44c) on the same basis of likelihood (τοῦ μάλιστα εἰκότος ἀντεχομένοις, 44d). This is exactly the way that we should expect fathering to differ from mere making: god imbued his material with soul(s) to carry forward his intentions with agency and forethought which, if they replicate his, are nevertheless all their own. If one wanted to start mapping the dense forests of modern Timaeus scholarship, this would not be a bad place to start, because many of the major branches of exegesis spread out from a refusal to take seriously the biological model which stands behind this crucial moment, in which the cosmos is endowed with its own life and creative agency. Along one branch we can trace scholars who elevate ‘reason’ to the status of a kind of superordinate agency for which maker and created gods alike are merely the vehicles;8 along another those who think, conversely, that there is nothing prior to the world soul, of which the ‘demiurge’ is an allegorical personification.9 Both moves determinedly preserve a single creative agency through the whole process – even to the extent of licensing their adherents to reassign to the demiurge activities which Timaeus clearly states belonged to the created gods – and to do so without further apology or comment.10 Other scholars acknowledge the existence of the created gods and their participation in the formation of the cosmos, but deny them the full creative autonomy suggested by the text. For example, it is very common to see the created gods described by scholars as if they are something like ‘workshop assistants’: numerically distinct from the master-craftsman, indeed, but with very limited – if any – real independence, and in any case working for his ends alone.11 But it cannot be too strongly emphasised how completely alien this language is to anything Timaeus actually says. In fact, given how naturally this extension of the craftsman metaphor comes to us, it is actually remarkable how scrupulously Timaeus avoids saying that what the created gods do is to help or assist or serve the maker. On the contrary, Timaeus goes to great lengths – most obviously for example in describing the design of the human body – to trace creative processes which are all their own: there is nothing about human morphology or anatomy (just to start with) that we do not owe to them. The verbs that are used of what they do are the very same verbs as those whose subject is the demiurge – including the verb δημιουργεῖν itself (and at 75b they are themselves described as δημιουργοί: cf. 46e); they have their 8 E.g. Strange 1985; Brisson 2017, 22. Archer-Hind 1888: 39-40; Grube 1935: 169-71; Cornford 1937: 34-9; Cherniss 1944: 425-6 with 603-10 (Appendix II); also, more recently, Carone 2005. 9 10 See e.g. Brisson 2017, 24, 53; cf. 2006, 12. As well as his general theory that both represent the activity of a superordinate intellect, Brisson may rely at the level of the text on the variation between singular and plural in Timaeus’ verbs of creative agency: as Cornford argues, in this variation ‘the distinction between the Demiurge and the celestial gods . . . is obliterated’ (1937, 38; cf. 280; also Grube 1935, 169). But (a) the variation might as well indicate the identity of world soul (sg.) and created gods (pl.); and (b) it is consistent with Greek usage to refer to a plurality of gods collectively as well as severally (the context ensures that there is no scope here for ambiguity). E.g. Steel 2001, 113-14; Broadie 2011 (esp. 18: ‘The ancillary demiurges are, as it were, extensions of him’); O’Meara 2017, 57. 11 4 own ‘reasons’ (αἰτίαι) for what they do, and they exercise their own ‘foresight’ (προνοία) (44c-d).12 The language of assistance and service is used in Timaeus’ account, by the way: but it is always and only used of dumb Necessity (e.g. 46de-e, 68e-69a).13 This is why it is not just inaccurate, but a dangerous misrepresentation of Timaeus’ scheme to say that the created gods are merely helping out.14 Of course I do not mean to suggest that the created gods go in directions that are in tension with the will of the maker; or indeed that they are not also doing what he hoped they would do.15 And this might be a good moment to remember that a father will, qua father, want to produce something that is like him. But what is important is that they do what the maker wants them to do for their own sake as well – exactly as a child fulfils its own ends by growing into the likeness of its father (and is like him not least in imitating his craft through its own self-creation). The demiurge in short wishes to create a living image of himself qua animal: and he does this, as a father does it, by creating something that wants for itself to be like him. 4. Advantages of begetting There are many reasons why it suits Plato’s philosophical purposes to think of the cosmos as a truly living thing – reasons beyond the purely formal that the cosmos will be ‘better’ in some sense if it thinks, but what thinks must somehow be alive. (I will return to this point below.) First, the claim that the cosmos is an animal (and not just an artefact) is important if we want to say that its creation is something that has more than instrumental value. In fact this is one way in which the creative involvement of a creature’s own soul in its own growth distinguishes it from an artefact, whether inanimate or robotic: namely that the creature becomes its own end as well as (if not instead of) an end for its creator. And it is important for Plato to be able to say that the cosmos has value for itself. The alternative would be to say that it has value only for the maker. But that would cause problems for the account of what motivation creation in the first place. For Plato surely would not want to say that the maker is motivated to create the cosmos because he was lacking in some way. O’Meara 2017 57 n. 56 appeals to ἀπεργάζεσθαι, 43a, and ἐξεργάζεσθαι, 46e; but it is mindless causes, not the created gods, that are the subject of ἐξεργάζεσθαι; and ἀπεργάζεσθαι is used frequently of the maker himself as well: e.g. 32b, 34a, 37c, 39e, 40a. (Anyway, both words mean only that the agents see through the work at hand, not that they do it for someone else.) 12 13 See Strange 1985, 29. 14 What might have led the majority of scholars to deny the creative independence of the created gods in this way? It might be that Christianity has had a distorting influence here. The Christian account of creation is beguilingly similar to Plato’s, and indeed in its developed philosophical form owes something to a reading of the Timaeus. Yet it is crucial to the Christian account that the world itself is not an animal or an agent, and that there is no world soul (cf. Boys-Stones 2018, 231 n. 10 with references). In consequence, the work of the Christian God is purely ‘artisanal’ and (although he is a Father) he is not father to the world. But this ought to be recognised precisely as a difference between Christianity and the Platonic tradition. See 42e, 69c, 71b; Sedley 2007, 124 traces the gods’ invention of the eye to the maker’s intention that there be sight. 15 5 And indeed, what Plato actually does say is that he was motivated by a sort of generosity (Ti. 29e30a): He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible. In fact, men of wisdom will tell you (and you couldn’t do better than to accept their claim) that this, more than anything else, was the most preeminent reason for the origin of the world’s coming to be. The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as possible. But generosity to what or to whom? Unless something else is benefitted by the creation of the cosmos there would not seem to be anything else; so it is important for Plato to establish that the cosmos is itself available as a subject of benefit. And the obvious model for something that one makes which becomes a subject for benefit in its own right is a child – certainly not an inanimate artefact. Secondly, it makes a lot more sense of Plato’s aetiology if we think of the cosmos as a child and not a simple artefact. In particular, it simplifies what needs to be explained, or at least what Plato does as a matter of fact explain; and it offers plausible causal mechanisms at every point which better respect the general shape of Plato’s metaphysics. Let us start by considering what the world soul even is. Many accounts of the Timaeus talk as if the world soul is a distinct kind of substance – not matter, not body, not form, but some sui generis stuff which is infused into the cosmic body once that has been created by the demiurge, helped out, as it might be, by the created gods.16 But if the soul is not form or matter or body – what else is there left for it to be? On a standard account of Plato’s metaphysics, there is nothing else available. Another problem concerns how world soul relates to the created gods. For these seem at the very least to rely on or presuppose the world soul. It is true that we do not get a full account of all the created gods – ‘to know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us’ (40d-e), and Timaeus rather unhelpfully hands over at this point to the mythographers. But those we do hear about are clearly the gods associated with the heavenly bodies (40a-b); and these are set in orbits which coincide with the circles previously described as those of the world soul (38b ff., esp. 38c and 40a). For both of these reasons, it is quite tempting to suppose, as many have done, that the world soul is not just one created god among many, but is constituted by the heavenly bodies in their orbital movements. To put this another way: the world soul is the coordinated system of the heavens. It is not a mysterious new substance infused into the world, like the (unnamed) life force infused into his 16 Archer-Hind does identify soul as the forms, which he construes as immanent realities (which is of a piece with his denying the reality of the separate demiurge: cf. n. 9 above): see 1888: 44. Commentators more typically suppose that there exists the ontological space between being and becoming for some ‘intermediate’ substance (e.g. Cornford 1937: 63): but I for one have a hard time conceptualising this space. Johansen stipulates without further justification a ‘soul stuff’ which is extended but not corporeal (2004: 140-2). 6 monster by Dr Frankenstein: it is a certain structure given to matter by the maker, namely the complex structure of the heavens – its ontology very much that of the geometrical abstractions from concrete bodies that Plato described in the ‘dianoetic’ section of the Line in the Republic, for example. (It is not coincidence that many earlier Platonist accounts of the world soul’s ontology were explicitly mathematical.)17 This identification, by the way, also makes sense from a mechanical perspective: if you think that the climatic conditions in the sublunary realm, the realm of ‘nature’ narrowly speaking, are affected and even determined by the approach and recession of the different stars and planets as they are carried around on their respective spheres, then you have immediately to hand the means to say both how the created gods (that is the dynamic system of stars and planets which constitute the world soul) work to create the patterns of the natural realm; and how the world soul (constituted by the dynamic system of the heavenly bodies) reliably governs (34c) and sustains it. So the procreative model as I have outlined it involves a straightforward alignment of the moving parts involved in creation: god, faced with unformed matter, gives it a dynamic structure, which we can call ‘soul’; that structure is such that it is capable of taking over and taking forward the creative project that god began, and the material cosmos, that is, ensouled matter, becomes at this point self-creating – in particular, it is entirely responsible for the development of the natural, sublunary realm. And once developed to completion, or ‘maturity’, it sustains the resulting organism by the very same forces and mechanisms it employed to complete it. 5. Summary My argument, then, is that it involves an artificial and uncomfortable construction of Plato’s text to insist that the craft metaphor dominates the cosmogony of the Timaeus at the expense of the model of procreation. In particular, it leads to real tensions in understanding the aetiology of the demiurge (who has to be both an intellect on the one hand, and creatively aware of material particulars on the other), and of the role of the world soul (whose presence seems awkward and overdetermined for what it is expected to do). My suggestion is that we let these two problems answer each other: to say that the world soul (that is, the initial structural unity given to matter) is the principal creative achievement of the demiurge; and becomes in its turn the demiurge of all that is in nature. Matter is formed by the maker into something that can grow like an animal. It ends up as an image of god, but also as a god itself – something whose fully earned personhood and self-determination is what justifies the generous impulse of god to create in the first place. And when they were not, they were ‘physical’, that is to say, they viewed soul as some intrinsic property of matter, as was the case with Plutarch. See Proclus, On the Timaeus ii. 153.17-154.1 = 8L BS with Boys-Stones 2018, ch. 8. 17 7 6. Consequence (1): A Nutritive World Soul I want to end with one important correction to our usual understanding the nature of the world soul, and one new exegetical bonus that result if my reading is on the right lines. The correction is this. The world soul is usually compared to the ‘higher’, rational soul of sublunary animals. This is a natural thought because of course the world soul is in fact intelligent, and the model for the intelligence of individual rational souls. And it seems in turn to reinforce the view that the soul is something infused into a body pre-prepared by the agency of the demiurge. For the rational soul too is ‘infused’ into a pre-prepared organic body: that is to say that it transmigrates in, and will one day transmigrate right out again. But if I am right, the world soul does not enter into the world body, but is its first structured feature, and the agent of its growth to completion. It is, in fact, rather more like the ‘nutritive’ soul of an animal. Is this a problem for my reconstruction? Not really. I am not denying that the world soul is also rational; in fact I have assumed that it needs and uses its rationality in order to do what the nutritive soul does for us, namely to craft the body to completion. It is only to say that the world is unique in having a soul that is at the same time nutritive and rational. But then there is no need to distinguish a second soul which can be the vehicle for intellect in the way that becomes necessary for a situation where bodies decay (despite the best efforts of the nutritive souls), but minds are still required to live on. The doubling of souls in mortal animals is a ‘fix’ for something that doesn’t need fixing where the cosmos is concerned. But note too that it may not strictly be accurate to say without further qualification that our nutritive souls are non-rational, and in some way different from the world soul. On one standard later view, the world soul is our nutritive soul – because the world soul is nature as a whole. The growth of our own bodies, to put this another way, is a manifestation of nature’s rationality. This is something Galen learned – rather to his disgust (On the Formation of Foetuses 700.17-701.6 = 8H BS):18 One of my Platonist teachers said that the soul which is stretched through the whole cosmos forms embryos. I thought that the skill and power was worthy of it, but I could not bear to think that scorpions and spiders, flies and mosquitoes, vipers and parasitic worms were all formed by it; I thought an opinion like that came close to blasphemy. 6. Consequence (2): An Intelligently Beautiful Cosmos The exegetical bonus is related to this thought – and it has to do again with why the world has a soul in the first place. I have already said that (correctly understood) it makes the world a subject, and a For Galen’s views on creation – and his distance from mainstream Platonism on this score – see Frede 2003, esp. 75-6. As in matters of soul more widely (see again n. 4 above), this is probably a question on which later Platonists would disagree with their predecessors: see e.g. Wilberding 2017, 68-71. 18 8 subject of god’s beneficence. But Timaeus also says that it has a soul because soul is required for intelligence, and, among things in the visible realm, the intelligent are more beautiful than what lacks intelligence (κάλλιον, 30b2). This claim is normally taken as a straightforward, if somewhat stipulative, claim that intelligent things just are more beautiful, or are better, than other things, and are so merely in virtue of their being intelligent. But another way of taking the claim might be to consider that intelligent beings (at least, intelligent beings within the empirical sphere, which is the domain Plato specifies here: ἐκ τῶν κατὰ φύσιν ὁρατῶν, 30b1) are capable of carrying forward the work of the maker in the way that I have just specified. They are capable of self-organisation in a way that things without a share in intelligence are not. Very shortly after 30b, we are told that completeness is at the very least a necessary condition of beauty (ἀτελεῖ γὰρ ἐοικὸς οὐδέν ποτ' ἂν γένοιτο καλόν, 30c), and we have already seen that the world will be ‘complete’ only if it makes for itself and by a creative intelligence like that of the maker, the natural species within it (41a-d as quoted above). So the claim that intelligent things are better / more beautiful might be much more common-sensical and less stipulative than it seems: intelligent things end up better organised just because they can organise and take care of themselves. 7. Conclusion The double-act of demiurge and world soul is a very distinctive, perhaps the distinctive feature of Plato’s cosmology, and we abandon it at our peril. At the very least we should reflect what we lose if we do. For example, we could do away with the transcendent demiurge, as Cornford and others have done, and say that there is only a world soul – but that leaves us with Stoicism and (a Platonist might say) no proper first principle to anchor the world to. Or we could deny the creative agency of the world soul: but, without making stipulative claims about the ability of the demiurge to compass both matter and forms in his thought, that is likely to leave us with something like Aristotle, where order ‘trickles down’, without coordination, from the first principle. Order results, to be sure; but a Platonist might worry that in the absence of any coordinating mechanism, there is nothing to infuse it with meaning or value. What Plato seems to have wanted is a world which is both good (pace Aristotle) and the beneficiary of some good (pace the Stoics): an imitation of god, but a god in its own right too. The elegant way in which this is achieved is to say that the world is made by god, to be sure; but is made as child is made by its father.19 This paper is a companion-piece to Boys-Stones 2021, in which I make the case that Middle Platonists took it very serious that god is ‘father’ of the cosmos. The implications I draw for their metaphysics and cosmology in that paper might be peculiar to their own concerns; here I only want to make the case that they might have been right that Plato meant to convey something of philosophical significance through the image. I am grateful to Anna Tatsi for the invitation to present this thought at the Research Centre for Greek Philosophy of the Academy of Athens, and to the audience for discussion on that occasion. 19 9 References Archer-Hind, R. D. 1888 (ed.), The Timaeus of Plato. London: Macmillan. Boys-Stones, G. R. (2016), ‘Philosophy as Religion and the Meaning of “Providence” in Middle Platonism’ in E. Eidenow, J. Kindt and R. 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