Abstract

This chapter argues that generation (γένεσις) is a bona fide principle in Timaeus’ cosmology, as opposed to an outcome of the interaction of the other principles. In order to make this claim, it offers a programmatic plan of the beginning of the second part of Timaeus’s speech. It concludes that powers are the prime agents of generation. Whilst generation in the absence of the world amounts to powers causing different properties in portions of the bearer; in crafting the world the demiurge gives depth to these portions, turning them into prime bodies, which did not exist before the world was generated. Bodies are endowed with both the properties received by the bearer and the power to generate these properties; therefore, generation is the cause of the bodily motion of the world.