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Hello, of all the great thinkers of the ancient world, few have been as influential

as Plato, born in the 5th century BC, the founder of the Academy in Athens.

According to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,

the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition

is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

One of the most extensive and important of these footnotes is a school of thought known as the

Neoplatanism which emerged in Rome in the third century AD. Its central figure was the

Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus, who with his followers developed

the scholarship of Plato into a subtle and mystical system of thought.

Neoplatanism was the dominant philosophical tradition in Europe for centuries, and was an important influence on the theology

of Judaism as well as on early Christianity and Islam.

We'd me to discuss Neoplatanism are Angie Hobbs, associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding

of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

at Kings College London, and Anne Shepard, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

And, Jeehobs, before we get into Neoplatanism, briefly tell us what Plato's importance was to that? To Neoplatanism.

Yeah well what Plato set out to do that they took up and took on? Okay so Plato has a system in which he makes a division between the

sensible material world and what he in terms of sort of an otherworldly realm of forms of perfect

ideal eternal, nonsensical principles and those are the things that are truly real and

everything in this world is simply representing it or imitating it and the idea

is that somehow we have to try to get as close to the

...