“One, two, three, where is the fourth…?” Plato’s Timaeus begins with a cardinal enumeration that suddenly becomes ordinal. Counting without apparent rank turns into an accounting that is governed by some principle of order. This sets the tone for what is to follow—a dialogue that is, on the one hand, about the relationship between order and material in a moving cosmos, and, on the other hand, about the role of written records in accounting for civilizations, as opposed to the erasure that reduces cities to sequences that do not know their own principle of ordering. If one were going to be able to give an account of the cosmos that makes its order completely intelligible, would there be a place in it for contingency? In this course we will closely read Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, with attention to these themes. We will keep in mind the political fate of Critias, who became the leader of the Thirty, and the reality of Athens that might be foreshadowed by the long-lost, mythical city of Atlantis. We will also think through the dramatic connections of these two dialogues to Plato’s Republic, for the cosmology of the Timaeus seems to fulfill the bodiless hypothesis of a city based on forms. Students will primarily be working from the professor’s own translation of the Timaeus, though they will be encouraged to consult more than one translation of both dialogues. No knowledge of Greek is required for this course, though it would be an asset.