Chapter 12 Johannes Kepler and the Pythagoreans

In: The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus
Author:
Jonathan Regier
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Chapter
Pages:
342–364
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004705838_013

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Abstract

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) writes in his Harmonice mundi (1619) that the Timaeus is ‘beyond all hazard of doubt a kind of commentary on the first chapter of Genesis, or the first book of Moses, converting it to the Pythagorean philosophy’. The presence of the Timaeus in Kepler’s work has been rightly commented upon by scholars, yet one issue remains generally unexplored in the secondary literature, and this is the context in which Kepler read the Timaeus and adapted it to his ends. This chapter anchors Kepler’s use of the Timaeus within the wider context of his intellectual inheritance, from Ficino to currents of Platonic philosophy in the sixteenth century. Attention is also paid to Kepler’s appropriation of Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. The chapter shows Kepler’s multi-layered instrumentalization (mathematical, natural philosophical, metaphysical, theological) of the Timaeus and the ‘Pythagorean philosophy’ that he believes to be at its core, a philosophy that is, of course, largely his own construction.

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The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus

Cosmology, Music, Medicine, and Architecture from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

Series:  Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 353
Cover The Legacy of Plato's <i>Timaeus</i>
E-Book ISBN:
9789004705838
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
16 Dec 2024
Front Matter
Chapter 1 Introduction: from Plato’s Text to the Beginnings of Modern Science – towards a New Understanding of the Disciplinary Inheritance of Plato’s Timaeus
Part 1 The Timaeus and its Reception in Late Antiquity
Part 2 The Medieval Timaeus
Part 3 The Timaeus in the Renaissance
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