School
Neoplatonism
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If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Visitors to the workshop often tell me that this or that painting is "Neoplatonic", and I have learned to be wary of the word, because art historians argue fiercely about how much philosophy the painters…
Started by Chiara Bellandi6 replies162 views -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies138 views -
One sustained note on the organ, and the case against beauty as proportion
I play the organ in a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory. This month I finally read Plotinus's treatise "On Beauty", the sixth of the first Ennead, and one argument has been sitting with me through every Mass. The old…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies136 views -
Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I model oil reservoirs, so I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs. Perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani6 replies215 views -
Reading group: Plotinus, “On Beauty” (Ennead I.6), the treatise he is said to have written first
I work in a library in Alexandria, and Plotinus studied philosophy here with Ammonius Saccas before he moved to Rome. That is reason enough for me to propose reading him together. "On Beauty" is the obvious place to start. It is short,…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies230 views -
A source that is not one of the things it produces: Anaximander’s apeiron and Plotinus’s One
In my library we keep a small display on the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and I have been rereading Plotinus between cataloguing jobs. What strikes me is a move that appears, in different forms, at both ends of Greek philosophy. Anaximander, very early, said…
Started by Mona Fathy6 replies280 views -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu, and my students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies127 views -
Plotinus
Plotinus was a philosopher of the Roman Empire, probably born in Egypt, who studied in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas and taught in Rome from…
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Porphyry
Porphyry of Tyre was a Neoplatonist philosopher who studied in Athens, became Plotinus' pupil in Rome and later edited his teacher's writings as the…
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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…