Plato's most ambitious foray into cosmology and natural philosophy. Through the mouth of Timaeus, a Pythagorean astronomer, the dialogue describes how a divine craftsman — the Demiurge — fashioned the cosmos from eternal Forms and mathematical principles. The world-soul, the geometry of the elements, the mechanics of sensation, and the creation of the human body are all given their rational accounts. The Timaeus was the most widely read of all Plato's works in the medieval West, and it shaped Christian and Islamic thought about creation for over a millennium.
