Late ancient Platonism in eighteenth-century German thought
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Bibliographic Information
Late ancient Platonism in eighteenth-century German thought
(Archives internationales d'histoire des idées = International archives of the history of ideas, 227)
Springer, c2019
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This work synthesizes work previously published in leading journals in the field into a coherent narrative that has a distinctive focus on Germany while also being aware of a broader European dimension. It argues that the German Lutheran Christoph August Heumann (1681-1764) marginalized the biographical approach to past philosophy and paved the way for the German Lutheran Johann Jacob Brucker's (1696-1770) influential method for the writing of past philosophy, centred on depersonalised and abstract systems of philosophy. The work offers an authoritative and engaging account of how late ancient Platonism, Plotinus in particular, was interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany according to these new precepts. Moreover, it reveals the Lutheran religious assumptions of this new approach to past philosophy, which underpinned the works of Heumann and Brucker, but also influential reviews that rejected the English Plato translator Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and his understanding and evaluation of late ancient Platonism.
Table of Contents
1. From Persona to Systema: Heumann's Dethronement of Porphyry's Vita Plotini and the Biographical Model in History of Philosophy.- 2. The Origin of the Division between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism.- 3. Changing Interpretations of Plotinus: The Eighteenth-Century Introduction of the Concept of a 'System of Philosophy.- 4. Thomas Taylor's Dissent from Some Eighteenth-Century Views on Platonic Philosophy: The Ethical and Theological Context.
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