Conference Focus:

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a sudden explosion of scholarly interest in Plato's Timaeus, his dialogue on the creation of the universe, the nature of the physical world, and the place of persons in the cosmos. The dialogue mounts space, time, principles of knowledge, mathematics, gods, souls, subatomic particles, plants, planets, metals, fish, birds, and goodness all within a single intelligible frame. Millenarian thoughts prompted by the new millennium aside, it is not surprising that the Timaeus is "back." With faith, religion, and intelligent design returning to the cultural menu, it is worth taking a look at how the philosopher who held that the unexamined life is not worth living and who ranked reason as the highest virtue works god into a rational universe. And with science now on the verge of blurring the distinction between bits of stuff and bytes of information, it is worth looking again at the thinker who proposed that atoms and subatomic particles are mathematical constructions. The conference will examine all dimensions of the work – its cosmology, science, and ethics, its literary aspects and reception.

The dialogue is one of the most important books in Western Civilization. Other than for possibly Plato's own Republic and Hegel's Logic no single work has made more original contributions to more areas of thought than the Timaeus. After the Bible, it is the work that has had the longest and strongest influence on Western thought. It is cited by Aristotle many more times than any other work of his predecessors. It was the first work in the West to have a commentary written on it. It was the basis of the Early Church Fathers, Clement of Alexander and Origen, fusing Platonism with Christianity, and so has had an abiding influence on both the Eastern Church and the Western. It was the only work of Plato's translated into Latin before the 12^th century, and so for a millennium it was "the glory that was Greece" on the plane of ideas. It was the basis of the Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance. When Raphael painted "The School of Athens," Plato was placed dead-center holding a copy of the Timaeus. It is the text that inspired Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1936). It is the book that launched Julia Kristeva's career when she used a meditation on the dialogue's concept chora (space) as the engine for her pathbreaking book Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Down to this day, the dialogue grounds the form of ethical and political thinking called Natural Law, the view that there are norms in nature that provide the patterns for our actions and ground the objectivity of human values. Beyond the intellectual content of the dialogue's core, its literary frame is the source of the myth of Atlantis, giving the West the concept of the "lost world."