 Thus Aristotle managed to articulate genuine principles of physics, but only “relative” ones that need to be understood within a more basic framework. It was Plato who, in al-Rāzī’s opinion, had gotten closest to putting forward that framework. Abū Ḥātim says that al-Rāzī told him as much: “what Plato says is hardly different from what I believe concerning time, and this, according to me, is the best thing that has been said about it” (Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī, AHR: 13). The text he must have in mind is Plato’s Timaeus, which he would have known through the intermediary of Galen (see Galen,  CTP  for the Arabic translation of his paraphrase of the dialogue). The Timaeus likewise postulates a pre-existing matter that is formed into the cosmos; it can also be read as suggesting that time and place in some sense pre-exist the cosmos. Furthermore, Plato puts forward an atomic theory in the Timaeus. In fact, al-Rāzī rises to the defense of that theory in Doubts about Galen (al-Rāzī, DG: §15.1-6). So there is good reason to believe that al-Rāzī was modeling his cosmology primarily on Plato’s, as he understood it, albeit with adjustments.