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145 results

Page 1 of 8

  • 13 - Nature: Plotinus’ Fourth Hypostasis?

  • from Part IV - Natural Philosophy
  • Edited by Lloyd Gerson, University of Toronto, James Wilberding, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • Book: The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus
  • Published online: 25 May 2022
  • Print publication: 02 June 2022, pp 312-338

  • Summary

    It can be difficult to get a handle on Plotinus’ conception of Nature (phusis), not least because of the numerous other connections in which Plotinus employs the Greek term phusis.1 Let us put the other uses of the term aside for now and focus on what I shall henceforth refer to as ‘Universal Nature’ or simply ‘Nature’.2 Universal Nature, for Plotinus, is no mere abstraction but a determinate entity that is causally efficacious in the sensible world in a number of ways.

The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus
  • Edited by Lloyd Gerson, James Wilberding
  • Published online: 25 May 2022
  • Print publication: 02 June 2022
  • Plotinus stands at a crossroads in ancient philosophy, between the more than 600 years of philosophy that came before him and the new Platonic tradition. He was the first and perhaps the greatest systematizer of Plato's thought, and all later students of Plato in the following centuries approached Plato through him. This Companion from a new generation of ancient philosophy scholars reflects the current state of research on Plotinus, with chapters on topics including mathematics, fate and determinism, happiness, the theory of forms, categories of reality, matter and evil, and Plotinus' legacy. The volume offers an accessible overview of the thought of one of the pivotal figures in the history of philosophy, and reveals his importance as a thinker whose impact goes far beyond his importance as an interpreter of Plato.

  • Chapter 8 - Recapitulation Theory and Transcendental Morphology in Antiquity

  • Edited by Ricardo Salles, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
  • Book: Cosmology and Biology in Ancient Philosophy
  • Published online: 21 May 2021
  • Print publication: 10 June 2021, pp 131-151

  • Summary

    The theory of recapitulation is best known in its evolutionary form, as it was this form that Ernst Haeckel captured with his famous biogenetisches Grundgesetz (‘ontogeny is nothing other than a succinct recapitulation of phylogeny’). It is a theory that is justifiably associated above all with the natural philosophy of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Yet some historians of science have raised questions about its roots in ancient thought, and this chapter aims to explore a selection of natural philosophers in antiquity (especially Empedocles, Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus) in order to determine how close they came to recapitulation theory. Certain Presocratic thinkers appear to have anticipated recapitulation theory in some evolutionary sense, but it is no longer to be found in Aristotle and the Platonic tradition. This is not simply because Aristotle and Plato rejected evolution, since there are also non-evolutionary versions of recapitulation which are founded upon hierarchical theories of transcendental morphology. It is shown that only the Neoplatonists can be credited with a clear commitment to transcendental morphology but that even they develop their transcendental morphology in a way that does not lend itself to recapitulation theory.

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