1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910349542503321

Autore

Catana Leo

Titolo

Late Ancient Platonism in Eighteenth-Century German Thought / / by Leo Catana

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Springer, , 2019

ISBN

3-030-20511-8

Edizione

[1st ed. 2019.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (VIII, 175 p.)

Collana

International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, , 2215-0307 ; ; 227

Disciplina

180-190

184

Soggetti

Philosophy - History

Protestantism

Philosophy, Ancient

Europe - History - 1492-

Historiography

History - Methodology

History of Philosophy

Protestantism and Lutheranism

Ancient Philosophy / Classical Philosophy

History of Early Modern Europe

Historiography and Method

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.