Within the depth-psychology and allied philosophical corpus, the Platonic dialogues—most consequentially the Timaeus, the Sophist, and the Statesman—function not merely as historical documents but as living structural resources for thinking about soul, cosmos, language, and political reason. The Timaeus stands as the cosmogonic touchstone: its Demiurge, World-Soul, and account of Becoming versus Being are cited, debated, and reinterpreted across millennia, from Cornford's meticulous commentary to Jungian appropriations of the anima mundi. The Sophist furnishes the depth-psychological tradition with its paradigmatic drama of false appearance, image-making, and the ontology of Not-Being—a genealogy of the simulacrum that resonates with later analyses of projection and psychic deception. The Statesman occupies a middle position, linking dialectical method to the question of governance and the soul's proper ordering. What makes this cluster of dialogues particularly significant for the concordance is the tension they enact between mythos and logos: Plato himself frames the Timaeus as a 'likely story,' and the Sophist's hunt for definition through dichotomous division models a kind of intellectual midwifery that Jungian and phenomenological readers would later recast as the differentiation of psychic contents. Havelock, Nussbaum, Lacan, and Cornford each claim different aspects of this Platonic inheritance.
In the library
23 substantive passages
This book is constructed on the same plan as an earlier volume in the series, Plato's Theory of Knowledge. It contains a translation of the Timaeus interspersed with a commentary discussing each problem of interpretation—and there are many hitherto unsolved—as it arises.
Cornford establishes the Timaeus as the pre-eminent Platonic cosmological dialogue, one dense with unsolved interpretive problems that a running commentary must address passage by passage.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
The Timaeus belongs to the latest group of Plato's works: Sophist and Statesman, Timaeus and Critias, Philebus, Laws. The whole group must fall within the last twenty years of his life.
This passage situates the Timaeus within the trilogy of late dialogues alongside the Sophist and Statesman, establishing their chronological and philosophical proximity as a unified late-Platonic project.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
the discovery of abstractions was the great source of all mental improvement in after ages... each one of the company of abstractions, if we may speak in the metaphorical language of Plato, became in turn the tyrant of the mind, the dominant idea, which would allow no other to have a share in the throne.
The introduction to the Sophist frames the dialogue's core philosophical stakes: the tyranny of abstract categories over mind, which the dialogue undertakes to dissolve through dialectic.
It should not be forgotten that the Timaeus is a myth of creation, not a treatise on astronomy. The surprising thing is that Plato should have found room for so many details in his broad picture of rational design in the cosmos.
Cornford insists on the mythological rather than scientific character of the Timaeus, a hermeneutic principle that shapes all subsequent psychological appropriations of the dialogue's cosmogony.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
Thus we have discovered that not-being is the principle of the other which runs through all things, being not excepted. And 'being' is one thing, and 'not-being' includes and is all other things.
The Sophist's ontological resolution—that Not-Being is not the opposite but the Other of Being—constitutes the dialogue's central metaphysical achievement and grounds its theory of false appearance.
the Platonic Ideas were in constant process of growth and transmutation; sometimes veiled in poetry and mythology, then again emerging as fixed Ideas, in some passages regarded as absolute and eternal, and in others as relative to the human mind.
This commentary on the Parmenides demonstrates that across the dialogues Plato's theory of Forms is neither static nor univocal, a point that contextualizes readings of the Timaeus, Sophist, and Statesman.
the temporal separation of the two conditions is merely mythical in the Timaeus, as in the Statesman, where Plato imagines the Maker removed from the cosmos and contemplates its collapse into 'the ocean of Unlikeness'.
Cornford links the Timaeus and the Statesman through their shared mythological device of cosmic reversal, showing the two dialogues as complementary cosmogonic narratives.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The comparatively short work called the Statesman or Politicus in its style and manner is more akin to the Laws, while in its idealism it rather resembles the Republic... In both the Republic and Statesman a close connection is maintained between Politics and Dialectic.
This passage locates the Statesman within Plato's political philosophy, identifying its distinctive fusion of dialectical method and political idealism as a bridge between the Republic and the Laws.
He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows—who, belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance... the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine.
The Sophist's climactic definition of the sophist as a word-juggling imitator of appearances—human rather than divine creation—is the dialogue's master conclusion, positioning semblance against truth.
Plato nowhere says that Timaeus is a Pythagorean. He sometimes follows Empedocles, sometimes Parmenides; indeed he borrows something from every pre-Socratic philosopher of importance.
Cornford refutes the assumption of Pythagorean authorship for the Timaeus's doctrines, insisting on Plato's eclectic appropriation of pre-Socratic philosophy throughout the dialogue.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Some of them drag down everything to earth, and carry on a war like that of the giants, grasping rocks and oaks in their hands. Their adversaries defend themselves warily from an invisible world.
The Sophist's 'battle of gods and giants' metaphor encapsulates the fundamental ontological conflict between materialists and idealists that structures the entire dialogue's inquiry into Being.
Suppose that a skilful physician has a patient, of whatever sex or age, whom he compels against his will to do something for his good which is contrary to the written rules; what is this compulsion to be called?
The Statesman's physician analogy exemplifies the dialogue's central argument that expert political knowledge may legitimately override conventional rules—a paradigm case of techne over nomos.
we shall be safer in accepting the general description of them which he has given, and in not attempting to draw a precise line between them... They pursue verbal oppositions; they make reasoning impossible by their over-accuracy in the use of language.
The introduction to the Sophist identifies the Eristic opponents against whom the dialogue's dialectic is directed, thereby specifying the philosophical context in which the method of division operates.
the intervention of Socrates intervenes as a rupture, and not as something which devaluates, reduces to nothing what had just been enounced in the discourse of Agathon.
Lacan reads the Symposium's dialogic structure—specifically Socrates's rupturing intervention—as a model for understanding transference, demonstrating depth psychology's appropriation of the Platonic dialogue form.
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
syntax, poetic and concrete... Platonic, 226-9, 305; in Parmenides and Sophist, 232s2; of Forms, 256, 259, 260, 267
Havelock's index entry situates the Sophist and Parmenides together within his analysis of Platonic syntax as the linguistic instrument through which abstract Forms become thinkable.
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
those who would at one time compound, and at another resolve all things... would be talking nonsense in all this if there were no admixture.
The Sophist argues that all philosophical positions presuppose mixture and participation among Forms, making the theory of combination among the greatest kinds indispensable to any coherent ontology.
the painter is a man who professes to make all things, and children, who see his pictures at a distance, sometimes take them for realities: and the Sophist pretends to know all things, and he, too, can deceive young men.
The Sophist's parallel between painter and sophist establishes image-making as the structural key to understanding sophistic deception, linking aesthetic and epistemological semblance.
Yesterday you entertained us with the hospitality due to strangers, and it would not be fair if the rest of us were backward in offering you a feast in return.
The opening conversation of the Timaeus establishes the dialogue's dramatic frame as a reciprocal intellectual feast, in which Socrates's prior account of the ideal city is to be repaid with a cosmogonic narrative.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Other entities or intelligences are akin to them, but not the same with them, such as mind, measure, limit, eternity, essence (Philebus; Timaeus): these and similar terms appear to exp
This commentary identifies the Timaeus alongside the Philebus as the dialogues where Plato explores metaphysical entities cognate with but distinct from the Forms—mind, measure, eternity, and essence.
in those who were originally of a noble nature, and who have been nurtured in noble ways, and in those only, may we not say that union is implanted by law, and that this is the medicine which art prescribes for them.
The Statesman's account of the 'divine bond' joining contrary virtues through law articulates the dialogue's central thesis on the political art as a form of soul-weaving.
In the Symposium, Plato will indicate both his love and h[is ambivalence]... the force of tragedy is usually, too, to warn us of the dangers inherent in all searches for a single form: it continually displays to us the irreducible richness of human value.
Nussbaum positions the Symposium and the broader Platonic drive toward single Forms against the particularist wisdom of tragedy, a tension central to her reading of the dialogues as ethical texts.
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside
Is not the famous expression—'You Hellenes are ever children and there is no knowledge among you hoary with age,' really a compliment to the Athenians who are described in these words as 'ever young'?
This passage reflects on the literary and rhetorical devices by which Plato in the Timaeus authenticates his mythological narrative of Atlantis, illustrating the dialogue's self-conscious construction of historical credibility.
To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the Gods.
Jowett's commentary highlights the Platonic irony embedded in the Timaeus's deference to divine genealogy, a device that foregrounds the dialogue's self-aware mythological character.