Argumentative Strategies for Interpreting Plato’s Cosmogony: Taurus and the Issue of Literalism in Antiquity

Abstract

Contemporary debate on Plato’s cosmogony often assumes that the ‘literal’ reading of the Timaeus yields an account of creation, while the view that the cosmos always existed is non-literal. In antiquity, Taurus has been seen as a forerunner of the ‘non-literal’ interpretation. This paper shows, on the contrary, that Taurus’ argument for the sempiternity of the cosmos is a literalist one, relying on a strict linguistic analysis of Timaeus 28b6-8.