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Hail and welcome. Today’s essay investigates connections between some of the ideas and concepts of ancient Western philosophy and those that have emerged during the course of my own religious investigation. As I’ve stated before, neither this show in total nor any individual episode of it should ever be thought of as something complete or decided. I don’t write these episodes from a place of broad expertise on any particular subject or even from having fully “figured out” my own positions, as this episode in particular will make entirely evident. Rather, my writing is itself my process of thinking through information that I’ve gleaned from various research. In that process, I’ve come up with my own ideas and concepts, but I doubt that I could claim any one of them as being entirely unprecedented; never has my research been sufficiently exhaustive to warrant such a claim.
I think this approach to philosophy, rather than being necessarily problematic, puts me in good company. Over the last several months, I’ve been reading the dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato of Athens, and I believe that his approach to philosophy was much the same as mine. If one were to read Plato’s dialogues from the perspective of seeing them as expositions of decided ideas from the first word to the last, then one might rightly argue that Plato wastes a great deal of our time in his writings going off on tangents that ultimately lead to dead ends. His early dialogues in particular often end without having reached any conclusion whatsoever. But if one reads the dialogues as being Plato’s process of thinking, a world of brilliant, complex thought emerges that shaped the very foundations of Western philosophy.
The concepts I’ll be looking at today belong to the philosophical discipline of metaphysics. This word—as do many philosophical terms—derives from the Greek, in this case from the words μετά and φυσικά, which respectively mean “after” or “beyond,” and “nature,” so “beyond nature.” The prefix meta- has, in common parlance, come to mean a kind of recursive discourse: something is “meta” if it refers back to itself or shows awareness of itself. The word metaphysics meant something a bit different to the Greeks, but I actually think that the modern understanding gives us the clearest picture of what metaphysics means today. Physics is the study of the behavior of matter, a discipline which split off from philosophy centuries ago. That which exists, as understood by the natural sciences, is composed of matter, and physics, going off the existence of matter as a given, studies how it behaves. Metaphysics, then, studies what it means for something to be in the first place.
Let’s begin with a simple metaphysical proposition: Satan exists. In order to determine what we can say about this proposition—whether it’s true or false, whether it’s knowable or unknowable—it’s hardly surprising that we have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “Satan;” perhaps more surprising that we also have to determine exactly what is meant by the word “exists.” In the immortal words of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
The discussion hinges on the philosophical debate between abstract and concrete objects, as well as on the meta-debate regarding how those two classes should be distinguished. To get us some grounding in the subject without making unnecessary preemptive commitments, there is general consensus that the physical objects that surround us on a day-to-day basis, such as whatever device you are using to listen to this podcast (or read this blog post), are concrete, and that they definitely exist (although the consensus on these points is not universal). Examples of abstract objects are a bit more difficult to formulate without commiting to some definition of what abstract objects are in the first place and thus taking a preemptive side in the debate, but I think a safe example would be the number 13. You can show me a rock, or a car, or a tree, but you can’t show me 13 except by way of showing me 13 of something, or a symbolic representation like the written word “thirteen.” Other potential examples include (using examples from the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy article on abstract objects) scientific theories, fictional characters, and conventional entities (such as the International Monetary Fund) (Falguera et al., 2021), though these may fall into one or more additional object categories beyond the concrete and abstract.
If we can decide on where it would be most useful to draw the line between concrete and abstract objects, we’re then faced with the question of whether abstract objects exist or not. Those who affirm that at least one abstract object exists are called platonists and those who affirm that the number of abstract objects is exactly zero are called nominalists, though this terminology is, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “lamentable” (Falguera et al., 2021). A platonist with a small-p must not be confused with a capital-P Platonist; the term “platonist” emerged in this debate because abstract objects were, for Plato, a central matter, but he committed to the existence of abstract objects in a very specific way, and a small-p platonist need not affirm any of those commitments. Similar confusion can arise with the term nominalist.
I’ve come to realize that this debate is one with which I should have engaged much earlier. Much of my existing work on this project has invoked abstract objects, and sometimes the existence thereof, as matters of central importance, without my having made any sort of prior commitment to the criteria and existence of such things. My making such a commitment, regardless of what that commitment ends up being, will have consequences for every doctrine I have ever claimed on this show. Some will be affirmed and strengthened, while others will require revision, repair, or abandonment.
I can make at least one clear commitment by way of getting the ball rolling: Satan, as a concrete object, does not exist. I’ll label the position I’m denying here as Satan as concrete reality for reference. This is to say that there is no object in the physical world which could properly be called Satan, and in this, I stand against Christians and Muslims who believe in Satan as a malevolent entity, but this does not necessarily put me in the same camp as the atheistic Satanists of the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. They and I agree that Satan does not exist as a concrete object, but we’re not in total agreement on the matter until I deny as well that Satan exists in any other category.
I might describe my prior, implicit stance as Satan as transcendental reality: Satan is real to me as a descriptor for a certain category or process of reality, or possibly a collection of such categories or processes, as reality exists to me in general. This stance draws primarily from William James but relies on arguments made by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. These arguments were developed, refined, or refuted—depending on how you take them—by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to whom I also have also made substantial philosophical commitments without ever having attempted to reconcile the two.
I’m going to leave off that discussion for a bit and switch gears to focus on one of the most fascinating and enigmatic documents of the ancient world, the Timaeus, one of Plato’s dialogues, although almost all of the so-called dialogue is in fact taken up by a monologue by the titular character. The dating of the Timaeus relative to Plato’s other works is a matter of dispute, although the general consensus is that it is one of the last that he wrote (Zeyl & Sattler, 2019). The matter of dating bears on the matter of how the Timaeus is to be interpreted, as Plato had different beliefs and philosophical goals over the course of his career.
The dialogue begins with Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates gathered to trade speeches. Socrates indicates that he had given a speech to the three of them (plus one other who couldn’t attend the latter meeting due to illness), and that today, they are to return the favor by giving speeches on subjects that Socrates has assigned to them. Critias begins by describing the military victory of Athens over the hegemony of Atlantis, but only in brief. The full account was to be given after Timaeus’s speech, and it seems that Plato had planned to give each of these speeches its own dialogue, but the Critias was left unfinished and the Hermocrates never begun.
Timaeus himself delivers the core content of the dialogue, an exhaustive account of the creation of the world by a divine Crafter (also called the Demiurge, from the Greek δημιουργός, which was also used by the Greeks to mean a craftsperson or artisan in general). This raises the question, again, as to how the dialogue is to be interpreted. Is Timaeus (and, by extention, Plato) offering what he takes to be the literal account of creation? That doesn’t seem to me to be the case. Towards the beginning of his speech, Timaeus admits that there is no way to produce accounts on such subjects which will be “perfectly consistent and accurate” (29c7), and that one should be content with his own account only if it is “no less likely” than any other (29c8-9). His reasoning on this matter relates to one of the central themes of the dialogue as a whole, that of Being versus Becoming, about which more presently. But in any case, these don’t sound like the words of someone who is about to describe what they believe to be literally the case. At the same time, Plato’s intent doesn’t seem to be for the account to be taken as pure metaphor. Rather, I think Plato is saying that what he is offering is a description, necessarily imperfect, of something that is intrinsically undescribable.
There are two sections of the Timaeus that I’ll be focusing on in particular, but before I get to that, I’ll have to provide the context of what Timaeus covers up to those points.
Timaeus begins his speech with a question: “What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is?” (27d6-28a1). This is quite the enigmatic riddle for modern readers—a problem compounded by a matter of translation which I’ll discuss presently—but those of Plato’s Athens familiar with its general philosophical corpus would immediately recognize the reference to one of the core metaphysical debates of the age. A thinker of an earlier century, Heraclitus of Ephesus, had famously posited that no one can step into the same river twice (Graham, 2010). Plato explains elsewhere, in the Cratylus, that Heraclitus had expounded a doctrine that all things are in continual flux. One cannot step into the same river twice because, after the first time, both the river and the person have changed and can no longer be properly called “the same river” and “the same person.” Although I don’t know whether Heraclitus ever stated this explicitly, this would mean that all being, in the static sense, is illusory. Another thinker of the same era, Parmenides of Elea, in contrast, argued that nothing changes at all. Although I don’t know whether Parmenides ever stated this explicitly, this would then mean that all apparent change is illusory.
As is mentioned in the footnotes to my copy of Plato’s complete works, the English verb “to become” has an obvious etymology: “to come to be.” Something becomes, and then it is. This has the effect of making it seems as though Timaeus is saying something contradictory: how could something come to be but never actually be? But this is just an artifact of translation. In Greek, the word γίγνομαι, typically translated as “to become” or “to come into being,” has no etymological relation to the word εἰμῐ́, “to be.”
For much of Plato’s life, we believe, his answer to the question “What is that which always is and has no becoming” was “the Forms.” In many of his dialogues, Plato explored the idea that abstract objects such as Beauty and Goodness have a real, independent existence. They are eternal and uncreated, and can be accessed and understood by humans only through the use of reason. “[T]hat which becomes but never is,” in contrast, is the material world, which is graspable by belief or opinion (δόξα) attained via sense perception, and which was created by the Crafter in imitation of one of the Forms (or some sort of organized collection of Forms) which Timaeus refers to as the Living Thing.
I mentioned earlier that Timaeus’s caveat against his account being taken too literally is based on this distinction between Being and Becoming. What he says specifically is that “the accounts we give of things have the same character as the subjects they set forth” (29b4-6). The accounts we give of that which is eternal and uncreated (i.e. the Forms) can themselves be “stable and unshifting” (29b7); these accounts should be taken at face value, provided that the author has taken proper care to make them accurate (which Timaeus seems to believe that he has). However, accounts regarding those things subject to Becoming are themselves necessarily unstable. They are not things that can be truly understood, only grasped through belief and opinion. In other words, Timaeus is asking his audience not to mistake accounts of Becoming, which are themselves necessarily subject to flux as what they describe is constantly in flux, for accounts of Being, which alone are capable of being unvaryingly true and graspable by understanding. When Timaeus says that “…we should accept the likely tale on these matters” and that “[i]t behooves us not to look for anything beyond [his account],” he is not saying, “Don’t try to find any better account because I’m the one who got it right,” but rather, “Don’t try to find something closer to the truth than any account such as this one, because accounts on these matters cannot approach truth in this way.” Timaeus isn’t saying, “I’ve found the eternal truth on these matters so don’t bother looking elsewhere;” rather, he’s saying that there is no eternal truth on these matters to be found at all simply because of the nature of the subject matter, which is itself in perpetual transformation.
As an aside, this is one of those passages that demonstrates to me Plato’s profound genius as a philosopher and writer. It’s easy to read the Timaeus as a naive work reaching well beyond what humans were capable of knowing at the time—and indeed, this is exactly how it was percieved throughout much of history (Graham, 2010)—but I think that something far more profound is in evidence. In the Timaeus as in his other works, there is a remarkable unity between individual passages and the work as a whole. We can hardly blame Plato for his self-congratulation a few lines later when Socrates congratulates Timaeus on his “marvellous” overture to the core content of his speech (29d3-5).
Timaeus continues on to describe how the Demiurge created the universe from the four elements in imitation of the Form of the Living Thing, and gives as well the various reasons why the Demiurge made the choices that it did in the process of this crafting.
Starting at line 35 is the first of the two sections I want to examine in closer detail. This section describes the Crafter’s creation of the world soul (ψυχὴ κόσμου in Greek and anima mundi in Latin). If you recall from one of my recent episodes, “The Soul in Ancient Thought,” the Greeks up to this point in history identified the soul (ψυχὴ) as that which causes living things to be living. The universe itself having been crafted, according to Timaeus, in imitation of the Form of the Living Thing, it then necessarily has a soul of its own. Timaeus’s account of its creation by the Demiurge reads:
The components from which he made the soul and the way in which he made it were as follows: In between the Being that is indivisible and always changeless, and the one that is divisible and comes to be in the corporeal realm, he mixed a third, intermediate form of being, derived from the other two. Similarly, he made a mixture of the Same, and then one of the Different, in between their indivisible and their corporeal, divisible counterparts. And he took the three mixtures and mixed them together to make a uniform mixture, forcing the Different, which was hard to mix, into conformity with the Same. Now when he had mixed these two together with Being, and from the three had made a single mixture, he redivided the whole mixture into as many parts as his task required, each part remaining a mixture of the Same, the Different, and of Being.
35a-b4
For commentary on this enigmatic passage, which was central in the ancient world to the development of Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, we’ll turn to Plutarch, the 1st century Greek philosopher and priest of Apollo, as well as the interpretation of Plutarch’s commentary by Professor of Philosophy Jan Opsomer (2007).
Recall that Timaeus’s monologue opens with an invocation of the debate between the ideas of Heraclitus and those of Parmenides, between the concepts of Being and Becoming. In this passage, Plato suggests that these two concepts, which seem mutually exclusive, are in fact complimentary. Under Plutarch’s reading, according to Opsomer, there are, prior to the Forms, fundamental cosmic principles from which the Forms derive. These fundamental principles are the One (or the Monad) and the Dyad. The dynamic between the two is a bit difficult to explain, but by way of taking a crack at it: the One cannot be anything, because to be something is to not be something else, and that would contradict the nature of the One. Similarly, the One cannot become anything, because becoming implies an incompleteness (here we have a parallel with the Parminedian concept of changelessness), which, again, is antithetical to the nature of the One. Therefore, a second principle, the Dyad, is required to interact with the One in order to generate motion and difference.
Those who have been following my work for long enough might note similarities between this concept and one which I exposited, however inarticulately, in some of my first essays and later came to call Principium Luciferi. I think that my most effective statement of this principle appeared in my essay from last year titled “Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology:”
In the beginning there was void and darkness upon the face of the deep, and being that the light had not yet been created, we know that God was of the darkness. In darkness there is a lack of apprehension, and in the beginning, in conceiving of God in Their primordial darkness—a darkness in which there was Story but nothing to tell, a darkness in which there was Reason but nothing to reason about—we are likewise confronted by a void in which nothing can be said of anything. What is there to say when all is one, and all shrouded in darkness? We need not imagine a literal God for this to be comprehensible as an ontology; indeed, what I am describing here is not a being but rather being itself. We need only understand the dialectic, the necessity of there being opposites and opposition for us to be able to talk about anything at all.
“God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Satan is the one whom we call Lightbearer, and it is in the context of this new light that discourse and reason become possible, even as these are the very things from which these principles arise. In this way, God and Satan are integral—the principle of Λόγος which defines God necessitates Satan—even as Principium Luciferi stands in opposition to God.
Bilsborough, 2020
At the time I wrote that, I had heard of the Timaeus but was not familiar with its content, and had not heard of Plutarch at all. I was, however, familiar with Hegel, who was certainly inspired by Plato and evidently—though I haven’t been able to independently confirm this—by the Timaeus in particular. I think that in my early readings of Hegel I had picked out, purely by accident, the Platonic thread within it.
The next section I’ll be examining begins several paragraphs later, and concerns the creation by the Demiurge of time:
…[B]efore the heavens came to be, there were no days or nights, no months or years. But now, at the same time as [the Demiurge] framed the heavens, he devised their coming to be. These all are parts of time, and was and will be are forms of time that have come to be. Such notions we unthinkingly but incorrectly apply to everlasting being. For we say that it was and is and will be, but according to the true account only is is appropriately said of it. Was and will be are properly said about the becoming that passes in time, for these two are motions. But that which is always changeless and motionless cannot become either older or younger in the course of time—it neither ever became so, nor is it now such that it has become so, nor will it ever be so in the future. And all in all, none of the characteristics that becoming has bestowed upon the things that are borne about in the realm of perception are appropriate to it. These, rather, are forms of time that have come to be—time that imitates eternity and circles according to number.
37e1-38b1
This passage furthers Plato’s unification of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Plato is saying here that, in our everyday use of language, whenever we conjugate the verb “to be” into the present tense form (“I am,” “you are,” “it is,” etc., or their equivalents in whatever language is being used), we are, unless we are referring to the eternal and changeless Forms, saying something false. The present tense form of “to be” can only truly be said of the Forms, and to speak of the Forms using past or future tense forms would be false, though we can use those for the realm of Becoming in which we exist.
That last line, which says that “time… imitates eternity and circles according to number,” is especially enigmatic, but I think I’ve gotten a sense of what Plato means by this by framing it in Hegelian terms, inspired by his chapter on Force and the Understanding in his Phenomenology of Spirit (2013).
The word “now” can be used in a general sense: now you are listening to a podcast (or reading an essay), and this refers to the time both before and after my stating this by some arbitrary amount. But consider now as referring to instantaneous time: this now, and this one, and this one. Even my saying the short word “this” passes over some number of instantaneous moments, possibily an infinite number, but let us say for purposes of demonstration that my saying the word “this” comprises three moments, corresponding to the phonemes of the word: the voiced dental fricative “th,” the near-close near-front unrounded vowel “i,” and the voiceless alveolar sibilant “s.” Although we experience a continuity from one moment to the next, and although the sounds elide smoothly into one another, they are nevertheless distinct: the voiced dental fricative and the voiceless alveolar sibilant are different sounds and I cannot make both of them at the same time: to do so I would need to simultaneously vibrate my vocal cords and also not vibrate them, and place the tip of my tongue simultaneously between my teeth and along my lower gum line. And yet the word is perceived as a unity.
The apparent unity of our immediate experience is thus, in some sense, illusory, and this calls into question some of our fundamental judgements.
I mentioned in the last episode that I’ve been working on a collaboration with another podcast, Absences. As part of my research into what we’re working on, I’ve been brushing up on my calculus, and I came across something that bears on our discussion here.
Let’s say that I take a drive from one city to another. My speed is going to vary over that distance: slower as I drive through the cities themselves, faster once I’m on the highway, slower again when I hit traffic. Speed is distance divided by time, so I can calculate my average speed as the total distance traveled divided by the total time it took me to travel that distance. I can calculate a more precise average speed by doing the same calculation over a segment of the journey: perhaps from the starting point to the halfway point, and I can get continually more precise averages by making calculations over smaller and smaller segments. But if I want to calculate my speed at an instant of time, I run into a problem. Speed, again, is distance over time, and I can calculate my average speed over a second, a millisecond, or a nanosecond with no difficulty whatsoever, but at an instantaneous moment, that’s a distance of zero divided by zero time, which is undefined. I can only calculate that value by taking the value that my average speed is approaching as I shrink the interval that I use to calculate the average.
Once of the textbooks I’m using for my studies is that of mathematician Michael Spivak, who has this to say about the phenomenon (keeping in mind that velocity is just speed in a particular direction, and also that speed and velocity are just examples of mathematics which can be applied to any change process):
It is important to realize that instantaneous velocity is a theoretical concept, an abstraction which does not correspond precisely to any observable quantity…. when velocities are measured in physics, what a physicist really measures is an average velocity over some (very small) time interval….
2008, p. 152
We do not experience time as instantaneous moments of stasis but rather as continual difference, and at the same time these moments are unified in their difference. That which unifies these moments as time, in its conceptual infinitude, is precisely their difference. And yet when I come to the end of a recurring weekly meeting, I’ll sometimes ask, “Same time next week?” “These… are forms of time that have come to be,” Plato wrote, “time that imitates eternity and circles according to number.”
Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, writes:
That the simple character of law is infinite means… (a) that it is self-identical, but is also in itself different; or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two. What was called simple Force duplicates itself and through its infinity is law. (b) What is thus dirempted, which constitutes the parts thought of as in the law, exhibits itself as a stable existence; and if the parts are considered without the Notion of the inner difference, then space and time, or distance and velocity, which appear as moments of gravity, are just as indifferent and without a necessary relation to one another as to gravity itself…. But (c) through the Notion of inner difference, these unlike and indifferent moments, space and time, etc. are a difference which is no difference, or only a difference of what is self-same, and its essence is unity.
2013, §161
My conclusion for today’s essay comes in two parts. First, I’ll address the proposition with which I opened this essay: Satan exists. That I have ruled out Satan as concrete reality leaves me with various abstract and non-realist possibilities which I must reconcile with Satan as transcendental reality. One such possibility might be termed Satanic fictionalism, which may be further divided into Satanic ontological fictionalism and Satanic linguistic fictionalism. The first would be the view that Satan has the same ontological status as, say, Bilbo Baggins. Curiously, we can make statements about Bilbo Baggins which can be either true or false even though Bilbo Baggins does not really exist as a concrete object (e.g. it is true that Bilbo Baggins is a Hobbit; it is false that Bilbo Baggins is an elf). The second would be the view that my saying Satan exists is not even an attempt to say what is literally true but rather a useful fiction. Yet another possibility is Satan as Conceptual Reality: Satan is real as a mental object, as would then be other potential abstract objects like numbers and relations. Yet another possibility would be Satan as Immanent Reality, under which Satan would have an independent existence as an abstract object.
These possibilities deserve full exposition in their own essay or essays, and that will be the proper place for me to fully explore and (perhaps) resolve the questions that I’ve posed here today. At the moment, I have no conclusions, but my work for this essay has pointed towards understanding Satan not in terms of Being but rather in terms of Becoming, in terms of processes and relations. My inclination, then, is to say that Satan has the same ontological status as physical theories such as general and special relativity, although there is a decidedly fictionalist component to my framing of this reality as Satan even as that paradigm remains, in my perception, fully real as Satan.
The next part of my conclusion will address the relevance of today’s discussion for Satanists, and for my audience in general. My brute instinct is to think of myself as a static reality: I am the child who watches Transformers cartoons on Saturday mornings; I am the healthy and stable person who flies to Iraq with the U.S. Army in 2005 to be a thug for capitalism, and I am the one who returns in 2006 with a host of physical ailments and mental disorders and a broad disdain for the military-industrial complex. I am the one who meditates for days on end in a Zen temple and I am the one who loses my religion after a pilgrimage to Kathmandu in 2013. I am a Christian, a Wiccan, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Satanist; I am an alcoholic and a tee-totaler.
How can this be? How can I be so many distinct and often contradictory things? The truth is that, at most, I can say that I was those things; more accurate would be to say that I passed through them, becoming all of them in turn without ever being any of them in the static, Platonic sense. What is I is that which is unified in difference.
Let’s not fall into the trap of locking our very being into a static reality that doesn’t exist. What we are can only be truly be spoken of as the fullness of our becomings, the unity of the differences through which we pass.
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, §51, 1855
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?”
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
Works Cited or Referenced
Bilsborough, T. (2020, August 1). Entering the Circle: Towards a Satanic Theology. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/entering-the-circle-towards-a-satanic-theology/
Falguera, J. L., Martínez-Vidal, C., & Rosen, G. (2021). Abstract Objects. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/abstract-objects/
Graham, D. W. (Ed.). (2010). The texts of early Greek philosophy: The complete fragments and selected testimonies of the major presocratics. Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F., Miller, A. V., & Findlay, J. N. (2013). Phenomenology of spirit (Reprint.). Oxford Univ. Press.
Opsomer, J. (2007). Plutarch on the One and the Dyad. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement, 94, 379–395.
Plato, Cooper, J. M., & Hutchinson, D. S. (1997). Complete works. Hackett Pub.
Spivak, M. (2008). Calculus. Publish or Perish, Inc.
Zeyl, D., & Sattler, B. (2019). Plato’s Timaeus. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/plato-timaeus/
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