F. M. Cornford

Francis Macdonald Cornford, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge, is load-bearing for the Seba graph as the scholar who most carefully reconstructed the mythological-religious substrate of Platonic philosophy — especially the plato-timaeus. His Plato’s Cosmology (1937; 1997 edition) combines translation and sustained commentary, and is the classical apparatus through which Jung and the Neoplatonic tradition alike reach the Timaean text.

Cornford’s distinctive contribution is the refusal to read Plato as if he were a later systematic metaphysician. He preserves the Timaeus’s own signals that its Demiurge is a mythic figure, that the cosmos has no beginning in time, that Reason persuades Necessity rather than commanding it, and that the receptacle is irreducible to Aristotelian matter. This reading protects the Timaeus’s status as a mythos eikos — a likely story, a philosophical myth — and so preserves for the depth tradition the reading the tradition requires.

Cornford stands with jean-pierre-vernant, e-r-dodds, and bruno-snell as a classical-philological scholar the Seba graph draws on for the primary interpretation of its Platonic inheritance.

Key concepts

• world-soul
• khora
• quaternity-timaean
• reason-and-necessity

Major works

• Plato’s Cosmology (1937)
• From Religion to Philosophy (1912)
• Principium Sapientiae (1952)