The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and Allegraium Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about middle platonism and Plutarch,

with one of the world's leading experts on these topics, Professor Jan Uppsoma of the Catholic University in Lubbin.

Hi Jan?

Hi, Peter. Thanks for being here.

So to talk about middle plaidanism, which is a school of philosophy that seems to be marked by very extravagant

metaphysical views, very strong, you might say dogmatic, metaphysical views.

I guess the place to start would be to ask how we got here.

So why is it that you start with this skeptical academic version of Platonism?

You have these philosophers who think that you can't know anything and you wind up with people who have these very strong metaphysical views.

Well that's very hard to tell.

Maybe it's even impossible to give an explanation why this is happening.

What we see happening is that the end of the Hellenistic period,

thinkers were becoming more interested in the ancient wisdom tradition.

One example of that is a number of texts by anonymous authors

that were attributed to ancient Pythagoreans, we call them pseudopographic texts. Those people were

interested in a theory of principles in a kind of dogmatic way.

Other people were interested in Egyptian rights and mysteries or Phoenician mythology

and taking these texts to be authorities on the gods, on nature, on the world.

So did they think that Plato was sort of lumped in with that kind of tradition?

...