Plato's Timaeus: The Art of Making Cosmos as A Remedy to Necessity's Natural Deficiency.

In Raphael's The School of Athens, Plato is depicted in the center of the painting: with his right hand pointing upward, he holds Timaeus in his left hand. Plato in this painting seems to be a philosopher who cares about divine rather than earthly things, and Timaeus, which he holds in his hand, seems to be a book about the divine. While it is true that Plato cares about the divine, at the same time, he is deeply aware of earthly necessities. Plato believes that it is necessity that compels human beings to seek that which is beyond necessity. Human beings need art because nature itself fails to satisfy all their needs. In this presentation, the speaker will demonstrate Plato's awareness of the problem caused by necessity and his reaction to this problem. Timaeus contains three parts: Socrates's retelling of the best regime, Critias' old hearsay of Atlantis, and Timaeus' law of the cosmos. I will also show how these three parts of Timaeus share the same premises and how they help us understand the book as a whole.