Platonismo

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
===== SYLLABUS OF LECTURES IV, V — THE FORERUNNERS OF PLOTINUS =====
**LECTURES IV, V THE FORERUNNERS OF PLOTINUS**

The evolution of thought in Plato's mind was a foreshowing of what happened to his school. The history of Platonism is anticipated in Plato himself. But before the fusion of Greek philosophies in Neoplatonism could take place, there had to be a new development and transformation of the older schools. Heracleitus and the Cynics had a new life in Stoicism ; the Atomists and Cyrenaics joined to produce Epicureanism; the Eleatics and Megarians lived on, to some extent, in the Scepticism of the post-Aristotelian period. Plato influenced them all, except perhaps the Epicureans.

The best part of Plato — his spiritual vision — was not preserved by the Athenian professors who expounded his doctrines, and before long the Academy devoted itself to a rather arid and timorous moralising. But the school came back, through scepticism, to a position nearer Plato's own. Eclectic Platonism became a philosophy of revelation. The earliest philosophies had been cosmocentric; the later anthropocentric ; the last phase was to be theocentric. By insisting on the supersensual as alone real, and on inspiration as alone blessed, it made a return to the true Plato.

But the cradle of Neoplatonism was not Athens but Alexandria, the meeting-place of East and West, hospitable to all ideas. The Neopythagoreans. Plutarch. Maximus of Tyre. Apuleius. Numenius. Ammonius Saccas. The Hermetic writings. Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy. Christian Platonism at Alexandria. The Gnostics.

Obligations of Plotinus to his predecessors. Life of Plotinus.