Proclus, head of the Philosophy School at Athens for fifty years, was one of the leading philosophical figures in Late Antiquity. Lucas Siorvanes here introduces Proclus to English-language readers, discussing his metaphysics and theory of knowledge and focusing in particular on his Neo-Platonism. Proclus lived in the turbulent fifth century A.D., a time of struggles among Christians, Jews, and pagans, the invasion of Attila the Hun, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of the Eastern Roman Empire (...) in Byzantium. While Late Antiquity has been regarded as a time of superstition and forbiddingly complex philosophies, recent scholarship has shown it to be full of cultural and intellectual vigor. During Proclus's tenure as head of the Philosophy School, he systematized Neo-Platonism as the summit of ancient Greek thought, brought it to its peak of influence, and became responsible for the form in which it was transmitted to the Byzantine, Western European, and Islamic civilizations. Siorvanes's extensive original research presents Proclus as much more than just a metaphysician. He surveys all of Proclus's philosophical interests—including religion, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and poetry—revealing the philosopher's central concern with the problems of being and knowledge and relating the ideas of Proclus to those of such other major thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. To help the newcomer, Siorvanes supplies more than 200 quotations from Proclus's works. He also traces the impact of Proclus's Neo-Platonism across cultures, religions, and centuries, in such diverse areas as Christian and Islamic theologies, Renaissance art, Kepler's astronomy, Romantic poetry, Emerson's thought, modern philosophy and science, and current popular phrases. (shrink)

Proclus Platonic Academy) is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the history of western philosophy; his writings did more to shape pre-twentieth-century understandings of Plato than any other person. But today few students of ancient philosophy would cite Proclus as an authority on Plato, and only a few scholars and certain people whom many would identify as enthusiasts or mystics are likely to have read a whole work of Proclus, even in translation. And although there are some passages (...) which can be read as original philosophical investigations, most notably—but perhaps this reflects my own philosophical interests—Proclus's discussion of the role of imagination in geometrical reasoning, even those passages have to be abstracted from their intellectual context to be made palatable to contemporary academic philosophical taste. The context is an elaborately triadic hierarchical metaphysics ranging between the limits of a One which is neither describable nor apprehensible because it is above being and a matter which is neither describable nor apprehensible because it is below being. But the metaphysics is also a representation of a pagan theology in which all the gods of fifth-century Greco-Roman religion find their place or places, and it is accompanied by a serious belief in practices standardly labeled magical. (shrink)