ABSTRACT
Although Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) shared the atomists’ opposition to Greek polytheism, he rejected their purely natural and nonteleological mode of explanation. In the dialogue Timaeus, Plato accounted for the
origin of order in the world by means of a godlike figure, the Demiurge, who imposed form on undifferentiated matter. Plato asserted the impossibility of attaining real “knowledge” of the material world, about which one could have only “opinions.” A true science of nature was possible only insofar as the human mind could grasp the essences of the eternal Forms or Ideas of things, especially the axioms of logic and mathematics. This was the basis of an important kind of idealism (not naturalism), according to which the rational soul has been “imprisoned” in the flesh, and true freedom is found in contemplation of the Forms.
