Numenius’ Temporalist Cosmogony

Our claim is that Numenius was committed to what might be dubbed as a minimalist version of temporalism, wherein the world’s punctual beginning results from the demiurge’s intervention, though this does not necessarily imply that the precosmos is a concrete state of affairs. To argue for this, we shall reconstruct a schema of the demiurge’s activity based on a synthetic reading of fragments 11 and 18 and show that a comprehensive interpretation of this schema supports such a temporalist cosmogony. In addition, we set out to demonstrate that this conclusion is also consistent with Numenius’ theory of matter, which supports a similar theory of demiurgy and, accordingly, a minimalist version of temporalism. Finally, we will conclude by elucidating what philosophical reasons led Numenius to advance such a peculiarly qualified kind of temporalism and what advantages this offered within the context of the Middle Platonist philosophical landscape.