The Role of the Rational Soul in Hearing in Plato’s the Timaeus

Abstract

The Timaeus is Plato's dialogue on the creation of the cosmos. It points out that Human beings' hearing perception is an important point to bridge the human body and soul. Usually, it is deemed teleologically designed by the Demiurge for their apprehension of the well-ordered cosmos, and, therefore, they can imitate it and then lead their own body and soul into a harmonious state. Centered around this topic, Andrew Barker and Elizabeth Lucia Lyon have respectively proposed two modalities to expound hearing. However, each hearing modality either fails to explain some contents in Timaeus or is inconsistent with the common experience in daily lives. The key problem is that they do not appropriately deal with the role of the rational soul in hearing. In view of it, this essay, based upon the similar working pattern between the world soul and the rational part of the human soul, makes some steps forward within the following aspects: the detailed way of the rational soul's intellectual cognition; the sorts of objects it recognizes; and its cooperation with the mortal parts of soul as well as somatic organs.