Proclus

Proclus was a Neoplatonist philosopher, born in Constantinople and educated in Lycia and Alexandria, who headed the Platonic school in Athens for about half a century. He gave Neoplatonism its most systematic form, deducing an ordered hierarchy of causes from the One in the manner of a geometrical treatise. Through the Liber de causis, adapted from his Elements of Theology, and through Christian writers, his ideas reached medieval Islamic, Jewish and Latin thought.

Key ideas

• Everything proceeds from the One through a graded hierarchy of causes.
• Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it and reverts to it.
• Philosophy can be set out deductively, proposition by proposition.
• Mathematics mediates between sensible things and intelligible realities.

Major works

• Elements of Theology (Στοιχείωσις θεολογική)
• Platonic Theology
• Commentary on Plato's Timaeus
• Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements

In the conversation

• Debate Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina Ikechukwu Anyanwu · 5 replies