Timaeus

Plato. "From the Timaeus." In The alchemy reader, ed. Stanton J. Linden, 29-33., 2003. 

Wilson, C. Anne. Jabirian numbers, Pythagorean numbers and Plato s Timaeus. Ambix 35 (1988) 1-13. 

Plato. Timaeus Jowett, B., Translator, http //classics.mit.edu/Plato/ timaeus.html (accessed February 2, 2010). 

In so far as the neoplatonic philosophy as applied to alchemy possessed a basis in ancient Greek philosophy, it was based mainly upon Plato s conceptions as formulated in his work entitled Timaeus. ... 

As the Timaeus of Plato appears to have furnished the more fundamental concepts which dominated the ideas of matter and its changes to the early and later alchemists, it will he of help in understanding some of these ideas if this work is explained in some detail. 

In the form of dialogue, though substantially a monologue, Timaeus is represented as explaining to Socrates his formulation of the generation and development of the physical universe. 

Citations from Timaeus are taken from the English translation by E. D. Archer-Hinds, Macmillan and Co., 1888. 

The foregoing sketch gives but very incomplete description of the physical basis of the Timaeus, but will serve to indicate the more important concepts which were particularly influential in determining the fundamental theories of medieval chemistry or alchemy, concepts which were indeed dominant in chemistry at least until the sixteenth century, though gradually supplemented bjr ideas developed from more practical chemical experiments. 

The five fundamental solids, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron were known to the Ancient Greeks. Constructions based on isosceles triangles are described for the first four by Plato in his Dialogue Timaeus, where he associated them with fire, earth, air, water and noted the existence of the fifth, the dodecahedron, standing for the Universe as a whole. These five objects are now known as the Platonic solids — defined as the convex polyhedra because they exhibit equivalent convex regular polygonal faces. 

Plato, Timaeus, trans. Francis M. Conford (Indianapolis, IN Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 29 d (18). 

The center of Greek philosophy shifted to Athens around 400 B.C.E., with the rise of Plato and his school, the Academy. Plato (428-347 B.C.E.) was an Athenian from a wealthy, patrician family. He had been the foremost pupil of Socrates (470-399 b.c.e.), but, unlike his teacher, he did not reject the necessity of understanding the physical world. For Socrates, only the Ideal and the nature of man were worthy of study. The Ideal was perfect, mathematical, and divine. Although Plato accepted the superiority of the Ideal over the material, he was also interested in human existence, writing extensively about politics and social organization. It followed that even if the material world might be an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, to make the best of one s life a person needed to understand both the material world and the Ideal. The best presentation of Plato s ideas is found in the Timaeus, which includes a description of the structure of the universe. 

Plato, Timaeus, Bk. I, trans. Benjamin Jowett, www.gutenberg.org/etext/1572. 

Plato s Timaeus, which gave medieval scholars an introduction to matter theory. Known to the Latin scholars as Geber, Jabir ibn Hayyan authored alchemical works that were translated from Arabic during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as were the medical and alchemical works of Al-Razi (or Rhazes, in Europe). Commentaries on Aristotle by Avicenna, Alpetragius, and Averroes led to a huge interest in Aristotle s actual work, so that important works like the Physics, Meteorologica, and De Animalibus were found and translated into Latin by the end of the thirteenth century. 

Plato, Timaeus, in The Dialogues of Plato, The Great Books of the Western World, translated by B. Jowett and M.J. Adller, Ed., Enclyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, pp. 442 477 (1993). 

The platonic solids (the regular solids, regular polyhedra) are the only convex polyhedra with equivalent convex regular polygons as faces. They are the building blocks of the universe in Plato s theory of five elements (in the Timaeus), and are examined in Euclid s f/ewewte. 

---