ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the reading of the Timaeus as a scientific text by the important and immensely influential Florentine Neoplatonist, Marsilio Ficino. In sum, the Renaissance's Timaeus is Ficino's Neoplatonist one, and its science provides the matrix for his account of the physical world as it had for the ancient Neoplatonists. Ficino's most important speculations on the science of the Timaeus appear in his bulky commentary on the dialogue. To Ficino, however, Plato had also introduced some subtle mathematical elaborations that go beyond a simple vitalistic account of the universe as "one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred nature". Significantly too, Plato sets up the planetary order as Moon, Sun with Mercury and Venus moving in equally swift orbits but "endowed with an opposite force." Demonology was a legitimate area of Platonic, Plotinian, and, in a way, scientific and cosmological speculation.
