Plato's Timaeus (Waterfield) π§
A standard view from the history of science would have it that only with the revival of the views of the ancient atomists by seventeenth-century thinkers such as Descartes and Gassendi did science free itself from the restrictive tentacles of the teleology of Plato and Aristotle. Since then science has progressed rapidly, relying on a mechanistic conception of the world in which there is no place for teleology.
There can be no doubt that Plato wants to link his account of the natural world to ethics and politics. In particular, the heavens stand as an exemplar of well-ordered motion. Just as the cosmos is well ordered, we, individually and collectively, should order our lives well. There is a good, that good exists independently of us, and we should aspire to that good. Timaeus 47a is a clear example of this, where we hear that we should try to bring the wanderings of our mind into order to match the unwandering motions of the heavens. Timaeus 90a ο¬., close to the end of the dialogue, ties up the preceding theme of ordering our minds along the same lines as the universe is organized, and exhorts us to be as much like god as possible.
There are philosophical objections to the multiplicity-of-accidents view as well. Timaeus 30a presents an argument for there being a single cosmos. In Philebus Plato says: βThe indefinite plurality of things and in things makes you in each case indefinite of thought and someone of neither status nor account, since you have never yet examined the number in anything.β
the incomposite is unknowable. Employing one of his favourite analogies, Plato argues that we might have an account of syllables (in terms of the letters which constitute them) but not of letters.
Timaeus does give a teleological account of incomposite entities in his natural philosophy.