Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes, or to support the podcast,

go to weirdst. This is J.F.

In the dappled light of an Athenian morning, some two

and a half thousand years ago, a story was told, one that would weave itself into the very

fabric of our understanding of the cosmos. The storyteller wasn't a poet or priest, but a philosopher,

a new kind of creator whose task lay somewhere between

those or the other two. Today we're diving into the platonic deep end by tackling this story,

the Temaeus, a text that stands not merely as a monolith of philosophical thought, but also,

and more importantly, I think, as a masterpiece of the speculative imagination.

In this dialogue, Plato gives us a creation story as metaphysical as it is cosmic, as biological

as it is ethical, even political. On the surface, the story resembles the mythological narratives

that came before it, but there's a

difference. Whereas the old theogonists like Hesiod and the Orphix spun tales of divine dynasties

vying for dominance over the monstrous powers of the primordial world, Plato subjects his

creator god, the demiurge or craftsman, to laws, transcendent

laws, which, while the human intellect can discern them unaided, are as binding for the

gods as they are for us.

Now there's no question that in many of its parts, and there are many parts, the Tameas will strike the typical

modern mind as an absolutely bonkers text. The idea that the universe is a living organism,

of which the human body is an imperfect reflection put together by fumbling godlings, will be

...