

HoP 081 - Jan Opsomer on Middle Platonism
24 snips May 20, 2012
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Return To Ancient Wisdom
- Thinkers at the end of the Hellenistic period revived ancient-wisdom traditions like Pythagorean, Egyptian, and Phoenician sources.
- Middle Platonists used these authorities to build theories of principles.
Systemizing Plato Like Aristotle
- Middle Platonists aimed to systematize Plato's thought to rival Aristotelian and Stoic systems.
- This drive produced diverse, strongly dogmatic systems.
Monad, Dyad, And Numbers
- They posit a perfect monad and an indeterminate dyad; the monad alone is sterile.
- By cutting the dyad the monad produces numbers as first entities.