Abstract

Plato's depiction of the world soul's cognitive activity in Timaeus 37 A 2‐C 5 offers a general account of intellectual cognition. He gives this account by describing the activity of an ideal cognitive agent, involving the very same comparative mechanism that governs human intellectual activity, namely, the active production of a propositional grasp of sameness and difference that things have in relation to each other in several respects. Plato depicts the world soul's intellectual activity as entirely devoid of immediate forms of cognition such as perception and/or intellectual intuition: everything the world soul cognizes is the outcome of its active comparison of things with each other. In particular, there is no direct cognitive grasp of the being of things. The paper ends with a suggestion as to how to understand Plato's account of the world soul's activity as an instance of the ‘like is known by like’ principle of cognition.