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Middle Platonism

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Middle Platonism refers to the development of certain philosophical doctrines associated with Plato from approximately 130 B.C. (the birth of Antiochus of Ascalon) up to and including late 2nd century A.D. Numenius of Apamea. Plotinus is thought to have inaugurated the next Platonic school of Neoplatonism.

After Plato's death in 348 B.C., the leadership of his Academy passed over his greatest pupil, Aristotle, to Plato's nephew, Speusippus. Speusippus was succeeded by Xenocrates, Polemo, Crantor, and Crates of Athens.

Following Crates, in 268 B.C., was Arcesilaus of Pitane who founded the New Academy, under the influence of Pyrrhonian scepticism. Arcelisaus modeled his philosophy after the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues, "suspending judgment" (epokhê peri pantôn εποχὴ περὶ πάντων). Like Socrates, the leaders of the New Academy wrote nothing and instead of dogmatically stating their opinions, led their interlocutors to use their reason. The brand of scepticism expounded by the New Academy is a matter of some controversy, but it seems to have been mainly in reaction to the strong dogmatising of the Stoics.

Antiochus of Ascalon, who was head of the Academy from 79-78 B.C., was able to intellectually maneuver around the scepticism of the New Academy by way of agreement with, and return to, the dogmata of Plato and the Old Academy philosophers. Antiochus, through his argument that the Platonic Forms are not transcendent but immanent to rational minds (including that of God), and his treatment of the Platonic Demiurge (from the Theaetetus) and the World-Soul (a notion from the Timaeus that the physical world was a living, ensouled being), provided the framework in which both other middle Platonists (such as Philo of Alexandria) and later Platonists would work.

During the second and first centuries B.C., works on Pythagorean philosophy emerged, and became intertwined with Platonic theories and Aristotelian cosmology. These works were penned under the names of Ocellus Lucanus, Archytas, and Timaeus Locrus. This trend in Platonism countered the sceptical turn of the official Platonic Academy.

Philo, a later Middle Platonist, synthesized Stoic and Platonic philosophy with Jewish scripture largely through allegorical interpretation of the Septuagint. Philo argued that God was beyond all being, and brought the cosmos into being first through a purely intellectual act of will, and then, via his Logos (word), the physical cosmos was brought forth, thus according the Logos a role comparable to that of Plato's World-Soul.

Plutarch of Chaeronea, Numenius of Apamea, and Albinus (mid-2nd century C.E., identified by some scholars with Alkinoos) are middle Platonists who inherited the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus and the various philosophical problems in the Platonic tradition of One and Dyad, the World-Soul (in the case of Numenius, two World-Souls), the parts of the Soul, and the nature of God and gods.

Dillon, John, M. (1977), The Middle Platonists, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Middle Platonism in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy