The World-Soul in the Platonic cosmology.

In each of Plato's major cosmological works, the Timaeus , the Statesman myth and the Philebus , he asserts that the body of the whole universe is alive and possesses a single WorldSoul which extends throughout it. I wish to offer a new interpretation of the role of the World-Soul which gives the World-Soul a special function in the economy of the Platonic cosmology and which explains why Plato would place such repeated emphasis on the existence of such an odd-sounding creature. I suggest that Plato is not viewing the World-Soul on the model of the Phaedrus and Laws X, which view soul as a self-and-other moving motion. Nor, I suggest, is Plato viewing the World-Soul on the model of soul taken as a crafting agent that initiates order. Rather I suggest that Plato views the World-Soul merely as a maintainer of order against a natural tendency of the corporeal to be chaotic. It is important to notice that in each of these three cosmological dialogues Plato claims that the ordered World-Soul and the order of the World-Body are severally and in their synchronizations the products of the workings of a single, eternal, divine, rational Demiurge, which resides outside the universe. Further, in all three of these dialogues the phenomena are viewed as necessarily in flux. The erratic flux of the phenomena wholly characterizes the pre-cosmic and acosmic periods of the Timaeus and Statesman myth -but, in addition, it remains a potent and considerable factor even within the ordered and ensouled cosmos ( Timaeus 43a-b, Statesman 273c-d and add Philebus A3a, 59a-b and Cratylus 439d, which do not dis2) tinguish between cosmic and acosmic periods) .