Abstract

Philosophers often devote their most painstaking work to distinguishing their own thought from that of philosophers with whom they, in fact, share a great affinity. One of the foremost challenges to Platonic thought has been to qualify its assertion that the One, although beyond being, is the ultimate principle of reality. For to assert the primacy of the One in certain philosophical contexts might seem to exclude the reality of multiplicity. Yet Platonic thought does not hold that multiplicity is simply an illusion: the phenomenal world cannot be reduced to the One. Platonists and Neoplatonists have therefore constructed arguments to show why they are not committed to a position like that of Parmenides, who...