based on Steven K. Strange's 'The Double Explanation in the Timaeus' in Fine's Plato 1

Please consult Strange's original article: these are notes for a class lecture, not formally written research: as such, it seemed cumbersome to note more than simply that this is based largely on Strange's article. It does depart from and embellish on Strange's article in places.

• Socrates' dissatisfaction with explanations of the natural world:
  
• In the Phaedo, Socrates criticizes the PreSocratics for offering explanations of things that are limited to mechanical explanations (Thales' famous "everything is water" or Empedocles' "everything is earth, air, fire, and water."
  
• Then he heard that Anaxagoras claimed that nous (intelligence) is responsible for the natural world and thought at last he would hear a more satisfactory explanation.
• But he did not.
  
• What Socrates wanted was a teleological explanation of the universe: one that would tell him what things are for.
• He thought that intelligence would order the world for the best: if you could show that this state of affairs is for the best, that would show that intelligence had brought it about (the example offered at Phaedo 97d was an explanation of why the earth is round).
• Why was Socrates dissatisfied with mechanical non-teleological explanations?
• First, he compares such explanations with offering a single explanation for contrary facts (a head for why Joe is a head taller than Sam but also a head shorter than Sally) or with citing one thing as a cause when its contrary could just as well explain it (why are there 6 oranges? because I added two to the four that were there. BUT had I taken away 6 from the dozen that were already there, it would equally be 6 oranges).
• It's not exactly clear what the parallel is supposed to be between these and Pre-Socratic explanations of the world as made up of element(s).
• Next, he tries a clearer tack (98c-99): suppose someone wanted to know why he is sitting in prison and we offered an explanation about his physiology and the structure of his cell, etc. That would come nowhere near explaining why he is sitting in prison in a significant sense of the question "why."
• Physiological facts are necessary conditions and have explanatory force, but are not themselves causes (99b1-3).
• SO, Socrates took refuge in the Forms and logoi (accounts) as explanations. BUT they are still second best (99c-d) because they do not offer a teleological account: why are we here?  Socrates wanted to be shown that the Good is the cause of everything.
• The Forms in the Phaedo address a lot more than the ethical questions of the early Platonic Socrates by adding in explanations of things such as "equal" and "taller than"
• The Timaeus, however, attempts to go even further and to supply the explanation of how intelligence is responsible for the whole world.
• The Timaeus mounts a "likely" account by assuming that the world is arranged for the best by intelligence and then tries to explain how that is so. So in the Timaeus, reason, which offers teleology, is an explanatory factor in the world, but it is not the only one. There are still mechanistic physical causes.
• The intelligence takes the form of a divine demiurge.
• The demiurge implements nature teleologically: goodness and order are accounted for by reference to the demiurge's actions:  the demiurge is creating the world as closely as possible to a model. It has an aim, a goal, a teleology.
  
• Cosmology is subordinate to ethics in that it is a practical enterprise that furthers virtue.
  
• The Timaeus' account of the creation of the cosmos.
  
• the account is meant to be unified, but there are 2 causes
• Reason
• Necessity
• These two are left unexplained: we have to figure them out from how Plato uses them. They are apparently considered basic or ultimate, not things that can be explained, justified, proven, or at least things not explored more deeply in the Timaeus
  
• Reason dominates or persuades necessity (48a).
• Each has its own domain.
• But their domains overlap.
• The account has three parts:
• up to 47 e is largely about the works of reason
• why there is a single cosmos
• why four elements (plus ether)
• how soul is structured
• how gods and mortals are arranged in the cosmos
• emphasis on what is intrinsically good, not just instrumentally good
• The universe is one complete everlasting intelligent organism.
• Why? Because those are features of the model.
• Why is that the model? Because it is the best possible (30d2, 29a, 30a6-7)
• Why is that the best possible?
  
• The demiurge has no hindrances in making the cosmos have those features.
• In other words, he need not compromise his reason for any other reason than necessity: his reason tells him to make it as good as possible, and hence, he makes it the best possible
  
• But he has to use soul to mediate between intelligence and body (30b)
• Necessity rears its head (more on that later).
  
• There are a few mechanistic elements in this part
• 42e-44a introduced necessary evil in the account of newly incarnate souls
• evil, BTW, was also introduced when souls were created by the demiurge! 42c: and evil leads a male to be reborn as a female, and if the female still could not be good, it would be reborn as a wild animal: clearly these are seen as bad things: but the logic of it is perverse, because it seems to make it harder for the soul to be good if the soul is made into a wild animal: that seems pessimistic, and contrary to the idea of "the best possible world": if it's a downward spiral, no point in creating. So this is presumably somehow a wrong interpretation (or a loose thread Plato would have snipped off if he had noticed?)
• these souls seem to be human souls, but they are assigned to stars: what does that mean for the account?
  
• also the account of vision is mechanistic (but its goal is observation of the revolutions of the heavens, which teach number, which is the source of all philosophy (47a)
• Then at 50a, he restarts, this time including necessity
  
• the work of the demiurge that is constrained by necessity
• purely material properties explained here
• elemental transformations
• aggregates of the elements into bodies
• affections of the soul undergone in relation to material
• pain, pleasure, sensation, etc.
• Reason enters even here
• 53b the demiurge gives regular geometric shapes (triangles) to the disordered pre-cosmic elemental stew.
• because the demiurge is good, the demiurge gives them the best shapes possible
• the demiurge is constrained by Necessity to give them bodily spatially extended shapes
• at 69a, another new start and recap of what has preceeded.
• the new start is an explanation of fitting together the two explanations of reason and necessity into the human irrational soul and the body
• the explanations here are both teleological and mechanistic
• the lower gods are at work here, not the demiurge (69c)
• what they produce is not absolutely good, as the works of the demiurge are
• they are good as instrumental means
• Thus there are three sorts of things in the Timaeus to be explained:
• things explained by reason alone
• 47e-48b marks transition to
  
• things explained by necessity alone
• 68e-69a marks transition to
  
• things explained by both (mortal living creatures)
• Roles of reason and necessity
• 47e: Becoming is a result of Reason and Necessity combined with Reason dominating and persuading Necessity
• 68e: Necessity helps and assists Reason.
• 46d, e6: the mechanical aspects of vision are called "accessory causes"
• It looks like Necessity is a necessary factor in the creation of the world, otherwise Reason would have no need to persuade it: reason could just create.
• But Necessity has things it explains on its own: disorder and randomness (46e): so it is not just a helper subordinate cause, but a cause in its own right.
• Reason is prior metaphysically, ethically, and epistemologically
• inquiries aim at grasping the Reason and examine the receptacle or the elements or Necessity only as a means to discovering the Divine cause, Reason. (69a)
• by grasping Reason, we can attain happiness
• because knowledge of the good and its causes produces happiness
• Plato has extended the reach of the good to include not just virtues but also natural causes
• only by grasping physics first temporally can we grasp the Divine causes of nature.
• The nature of these types of causes
• Aristotle would later divide causes into four kinds: efficient, material, formal, and final. Strange attempts to fit the Timaeus within that framework, but he is doing more than that and he does not seem to do that completely.
  
• Reason in the Timaeus would be what Aristotle called efficient causality (it sets things in motion): Reason is the demiurge.
• The Demiurge works by making this world as much like the model, the World of Forms, as possible. And that results in the intelligible living creature that is the world as well as the living creatures within it that we are.
• So the Demiurge is guided by the Forms as a model (Final cause, related to Formal cause, but not identical)
• Reason seems to supply a Final cause: anything good in the world is explained by appeal to Reason's desire to instantiate the good (i.e. the model of the Forms) in the world.
• In the Phaedrus and the Laws by Plato, all motion in the world is said to be traceable back by causal chains to the motion of soul, which is primary motion and is self-caused:
  
• this looks akin to Reason in the Timaeus, which is closely connected with soul (the Demiurge creates soul) and whose activity is thought, which is "most causal" (76d8) and dominates the mechanistic causes of Necessity.
• the activity of souls is like but not the same as that of the demiurge: the soul is self-caused efficient causality when it initiates motion, and operates with or without the Forms, but the Demiurge/Reason is always guided by the Forms.
• Evil
• bad and foolish actions are not caused by reason's activity in souls
• they are caused by Necessity which disturbs the circular motion of reason in the soul.
• people are not to be held responsible for their bad actions
• they are due to disorders and diseases of the soul
• 87d7-e1: no one is willingly bad
• but if all bad actions are due to physiological necessity, and all good actions are due to divinely guided reason, what is there left for the soul to do or be?
• Strange suggests the obvious path is to take "divinely guided reason" mythically and interpret it simply as human reason.
• 90a2-3: the highest part of the soul is a god-given genius daemon.
• 41c7: the daemon is the divine element in humans.
• So reason is the universal final cause
• It is also an efficient cause
• It is not a universal efficient cause
• What else is an efficient cause? Necessity.
  
• Necessity and Forms
  
• The structure of the Forms has consequences for the world of Becoming.
• Some Forms bring along other Forms: Oneness brings along Oddness, for example.
  
• Some Forms bring along certain forms and also exclude others
• Oneness brings along Oddness and excludes Evenness and Twoness, for example.
• Thus Forms have causal implications (what does that mean?: it's Vlastos' phrase)
• This seems like necessity, no? but it attaches to Forms.
• seems to recall the blending rules of the Sophist
  
• The Phaedo has simple examples: Fire imports Heat and excludes Cold.
• In forming the cosmos, the causal implications of the forms hindered the cosmos from being a perfect likeness of the world of Forms, says Strange.
• For example, in forming the human body, the god wanted to protect it with a layer of flesh, the thicker the better for protection, but he also wanted it to be flexible and able to perceive, which would not happen with a very thick layer of flesh.
  
• So the various goals of the god work at cross-purposes to each other, because the material the god works with has necessity that interferes (can't make dry water or flexible adamant): see below.
  
• One wonders why these same cross-purposes don't affect the Forms themselves: conundrums of the Parmenides.
• Again, this seems like necessity: perhaps they don't affect forms because just as mathematics is self-consistent pretty much by definition, so too Forms are self-consistent.
  
• Thus the god is limited by the constraints of materials: that is what is called Necessity.
  
• "Necessity is not merely formal causality: it seems to involve material causality as well. The craftsman of the cosmos uses the reflections or images of the Forms in the Receptacle for his raw materials, as a sculptor would use stone or other material that he knows how to cleave or mold. Necessity comes into play only when these materials are combined: it is not the properties themselves that are incompatible with perfection but their joint embodiment. These constraints on Reason are intimately connected with the corporeality of the physical world." (Strange, P. 411)
• it is only in physical reality that smallness and tallness ever are co-present, for example. In Forms, they are not co-present in anything.
• (but one does wonder what it means for the form of smallness to be a form vis-a-vis other forms. What I mean is, aren't the forms dependent on their instantiations just as much as the instantiations are dependent on the forms? Heretical question. Prolly incoherent. Forget it.)
  
• The combination of Reason and Necessity
• Reason always makes things for the best.
• Necessity accounts for properties of phenomena as unavoidable consequences of the embodiment of Forms, and "the best" is irrelevant to it.
  
• Inherently good things such as unity, order, intelligence, are attributable to the causal force of Reason alone
• this is non-instrumental purely teleological explanation/causation.
  
• Some goods are such that they are not good in themselves, but they contribute to the overall order or goodness of the universe: they are compromises between Reason and Necessity. They are instrumentally good.
  
• Reason provides their goodness but must act by means of certain materials, which Necessity has caused to have some disorder/randomness.
• It is like Aristotle's hypothetical necessity
• Something is hypothetically necessary: if a certain goal is to be realized, then such and such material preconditions must obtain. (in the Timaeus: if the universe is to exist, then the soul must be embodied)
  
• A necessary precondition would come to be called an auxiliary cause in Aristotle (sunaition): the demiurge must reason from desired effect to what will cause that desired affect: hence mixed causality of necessity and reason.
• So necessity pertains to whatever thing or situation obtains in the physical world: if X obtains, then Y follows. If Y is good, then X is instrumentally good.  (reason accounts for that goodness). If Y is bad or not good, then Necessity is working on its own.
• Necessity is by nature the cause of all evil, but it also causes things that are neither good nor evil.
  
• Necessity and the "Wandering Cause"
• 48a6 calls Necessity a "Wandering Cause"
• on its own, it produces  disorderly motion.
• thus it seems like chance, which Aristotle classifies as an efficient cause.
• "But how can Necessity, if founded upon the reliable natures of Forms, produce chance and disorder?" P413
• just as order is always a product of Reason, so disorder is always a product of Necessity.
• every phenomenal object instantiates many properties, all of which have causal implications
• hence any phenomenal object will bring with it side-effects, some of which will be undesireable
• cf. the coating of flesh which is designed for protection, but necessarily brings with it inflexibility
• these unavoidable side-effects are what Plato calls chance
• they are irrelevant to the Forms, however, because they don't have the same many properties as their material sensible instantiations.