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1 results

  • 6 - Numenius of Apamea

  • from I - Philosophy in the later Roman Empire
  • Edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity
    Published online:
    28 May 2011
    Print publication:
    01 January 2000, pp 115-125

  • Summary

    Numenius of Apamea is a thinker whom we know only from the reports of later witnesses who were anything but dispassionate historians of philosophy. Pythagorean is the most common epithet for Numenius. From the first book On the Good, Eusebius transcribes an arresting simile, which may, as its position in the arrangement of des Places implies, have served as an exordium to the main argument. Numenius can be reconciled with Plato if his cosmogony is interpreted as the playful or symbolic exhibition of an evergreen paradox. Numenius may be an eccentric Platonist, but it would be more eccentric still to call him anything other than a Platonist. Numenius seems not to have anticipated the Later Platonic postulate of a First Cause higher than intellect and being, but his fusion of metaphysics and psychology shows that he, like Plotinus, regarded the deliverance of the soul from its worldly attachments and the purification of the mind from error as inseparable goals.