Abstract
‘The nature of things’ examines Plato's understanding of the natural world. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the creation of the world as work done by a divine Craftsman, who does the job by reference to a model — a system of rational principles. The real world is not, as we uncritically take it to be, the world around us that our senses report to us; it is rather what we grasp in thought when exercising our minds in abstract philosophical argument, in particular arguments which lead to what Plato calls Forms — the Forms which function as patterns for the Craftsman as he makes our world.
