Abstract

When Timaeus claims that all vice is involuntary, and that it is not individual human beings but their “nurturers” and begetters” who must be assigned causal responsibility for human vice, he is extending the grand cosmological discourse he has been offering to include the causes of human vice, and he is presenting a novel twist on the Socratic paradox familiar from earlier works, that no one does wrong voluntarily. He is not, however, contradicting his earlier claims that human beings, rather than the gods, are responsible for human evils. This is because 86b-87b does assign responsibility to human causes and responsibility for individual actions is not under discussion there.