Everything about Middle Platonism totally explained
Middle Platonism was the development of certain
philosophical doctrines associated with
Plato from approximately 130 B.C. (the birth of
Antiochus of Ascalon) up to and including late 2nd century A.D.
Numenius of Apamea.
Plotinus is thought to have inaugurated the next Platonic school of
Neoplatonism.
History
After Plato's death in 348 B.C., the leadership of his
Academy passed over his greatest pupil,
Aristotle, to Plato's nephew,
Speusippus. Speusippus was succeeded by
Xenocrates,
Polemon,
Crantor, and
Crates of Athens.
Following Crates, in 268 B.C., was
Arcesilaus of Pitane who founded the New Academy, under the influence of Pyrrhonian scepticism. Arcelisaus modeled his philosophy after the
Socrates of Plato's early dialogues, "suspending judgment" (epokhê peri pantôn εποχὴ περὶ πάντων). Like Socrates, the leaders of the New Academy wrote nothing and instead of dogmatically stating their opinions, led their interlocutors to use their reason. The brand of scepticism expounded by the New Academy is a matter of some controversy, but it seems to have been mainly in reaction to the strong dogmatising of the Stoics.
Antiochus of Ascalon, who was head of the Academy from 79-78 B.C., was able to intellectually maneuver around the scepticism of the New Academy by way of agreement with, and return to, the
dogmata of Plato and the Old Academy philosophers. Antiochus, through his argument that the Platonic Forms are not transcendent but immanent to rational minds (including that of God), and his treatment of the Platonic
Demiurge (from the
Theaetetus) and the World-Soul (a notion from the
Timaeus that the physical world was a living, ensouled being), provided the framework in which both other middle Platonists (such as
Philo of Alexandria) and later Platonists would work.
During the second and first centuries B.C., works on Pythagorean philosophy emerged, and became intertwined with Platonic theories and Aristotelian cosmology. These works were penned under the names of Ocellus Lucanus, Archytas, and Timaeus Locrus. This trend in Platonism countered the sceptical turn of the official Platonic Academy.
Philo, a later Middle Platonist, synthesized
Stoic and Platonic philosophy with Jewish scripture largely through
allegorical interpretation of the
Septuagint. Philo argued that God was beyond all being, and brought the cosmos into being first through a purely intellectual act of will, and then, via his
Logos (word), the physical cosmos was brought forth, thus according the Logos a role comparable to that of Plato's World-Soul.
Plutarch of Chaeronea,
Numenius of Apamea, and
Albinus (mid-2nd century C.E., identified by some scholars with
Alkinoos) are middle Platonists who inherited the cosmology of Plato's
Timaeus and the various philosophical problems in the Platonic tradition of One and Dyad, the World-Soul (in the case of Numenius, two World-Souls), the parts of the Soul, and the nature of God and Gods.
Selected References
Dillon, John, M. (1977),
The Middle Platonists, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Further Information
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