- Later Philosophy
(By Anthony Meredith)General Tendencies
The period with which this section is concerned is bracketed by the lives of the two most interesting and important figures of later philosophy,
Posidonius of Apamea in Syria (d. 51 B.C.) and Plotinus, an Egyptian by birth, who died in Rome in 270 A.D. The former of these two was one of the
most widely travelled and deeply learned men of his age, who interested himself in a whole range of subjects including rhetoric, geography, and recent
history, taking over in the latter field where Polybius had left off. He was also a philosopher and represents a tendency present in a good deal of the
philosophy of the period, to harmonize the apparently conflicting views held by the main schools of the age. So, though he was himself a Stoic, he seems
to have been willing to depart from the traditional views of his school in two important matters, theology and anthropology. Unlike such Stoics as Zeno
and Chrysippus, he seems to have admitted the existence of a god who was in some sense transcendent, and also to have accepted the existence in man of
the irrational appetites as being truly human. In both of these areas he departs from the monism and the intellectualism of the Stoic school as it is
represented both in the founders of the fourth century and the later Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD. Plotinus, too, though
an immeasurably greater philosopher, indeed arguably the greatest since Aristotle and for a long time to come, was also prepared, as his biographer and
pupil Porphyry tells us in his Life, to use the teachings of both Aristotle and the Stoics in addition to his master Plato.
In between these two towering figures crowd a host of lesser men whose main claim to fame is that they help to explain the genesis of Plotinus, but who
also shed light both on the history of their respective schools and on the early growth of Christian reflection and doctrine. There are, however, certain
overall features which can be found to a greater or lesser extent in all the writers of the period.