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.
Dr Leo Catana is associate professor in Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where he works on ancient Greek and Renaissance philosophy. His main interests within these two periods concern ethics and political thought, especially within the tradition of Platonism and the way in which it has been understood and evaluated in the course of history. He is member of the editorial committee of the Classica et Mediaevalia, and he is co-organizing The Copenhagen Intellectual History seminar.
Innehållsförteckning
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.