ABSTRACT
Timaeus prelude, marked off from what follows by Socrate's expression of approval, lays down the principles of the whole discourse and defines the limitations of any treatment of physics. As in the Timaeus, the Craftsman is substituted as the equivalent of the maker and of the cause. The divine production of originals is parallel to the human craftsmanship which builds an actual house. On the contrary, Aristotle says that they did not distinguish sensible bodies from the solids of mathematics, as if they agreed with the physical philosophers in general that the visible world is the real. This is one of many grounds for rejecting the thesis that the Timaeus is merely reproducing fifth-century Pythagoreanism. In fact, they ignored the distinction here drawn by Plato between the field of eternal truth, which includes mathematics, and the region of physics.
