The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus

Jacomien Prins is a research fellow at Utrecht University. She has worked extensively on the interaction between music and philosophy in the Renaissance. Her work includes Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (Brill, 2014), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (Routledge, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being (Routledge, 2018). Edmund Thomas is Associate Professor in Ancient Visual and Material Culture at Durham University and a former director of the Durham Centre for Classical Reception. He has published many works on the intellectual and cultural background of Greek and Roman architecture and the classical architectural tradition up to the present day, including Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Note on Translations, Editions, and Abbreviations

Notes on Contributors



1 Introduction: from Plato’s Text to the Beginnings of Modern Science – towards a New Understanding of the Disciplinary Inheritance of Plato’s Timaeus

 Jacomien Prins and Edmund Thomas



PART 1: The Timaeus and its Reception in Late Antiquity

2 Mathematization in Plato’s Timaeus

 Barbara M. Sattler



3 Towards the Quadrivium: the Role of the Timaeus in the Constitution of a Corpus of Mathematical Sciences

 Federico M. Petrucci



4 Galen’s Timaeus

 Robert Vinkesteijn



5 From Text to Building: the Impact of the Timaeus on the Discipline of Architecture in Later Antiquity

 Edmund Thomas



PART 2: The Medieval Timaeus

6 The Reception of the Timaeus in Medieval Music Theory and Practice

 Barbara Haggh-Huglo



7 Signum, Ordo, Machina: Nature in Twelfth-century Chartres, Paris and Bologna between Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Heritage

 Riccardo Saccenti



8 Curing Body and Soul with Plato’s Timaeus in the Eastern Roman Empire (284–1453)

 Frederick Lauritzen



9 The Timaeus and Durham Cathedral

 John Shannon Hendrix



PART 3: The Timaeus in the Renaissance

10 ‘Not for Irrational Pleasure’: Music in Marsilio Ficino’s Timaeus Commentary

 Jacomien Prins



11 Saving the Phenomena: Geometric Atomism and the Timaeus in the Renaissance

 Guy Claessens



12 Johannes Kepler and the Pythagoreans

 Jonathan Regier



13 Vesalius and the Timaeus. The Anatomist’s Answer to the Philosopher

 Jacqueline Vons



14 The Timaeus, Perspective, and Early Renaissance Concepts of Architectural Space

 Nicholas Temple



Index