Ordre et désordre dans l’univers

Abstract

This book offers a new interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus in which the cosmological myth is identified with a thought experiment. Timaeus’ discourse asks us what we would do if we were a divine craftsman in charge of fashioning the universe by bestowing order upon a chaotic milieu. After having adopted three criteria to be satisfied to belong to the category of thought experiment (1: counterfactuality; 2: necessity of image productions; 3: cognitive progress), it is defended that Timaeus’ speech contains both a sequence of deductive arguments and the possibility to combine these arguments into different mental models of the universe.