Most Famous Platonism Philosophers

Philosophers in this tradition

• Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430 · Roman

  Augustine of Hippo was a Roman-African theologian and philosopher whose work shaped Western Christianity and Latin philosophy for the next millennium. His Confessions, addressed...

• Philo of Alexandria 25 BC – 50 AD · Hellenistic Jewish

  Philo of Alexandria was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who synthesized the Hebrew scriptures with Greek philosophical thought, especially Platonism and Stoicism. He developed ...

• Gregory of Nyssa 335 AD – 395 AD · Greek

  Gregory of Nyssa was a fourth-century Cappadocian bishop and theologian and one of the architects of orthodox Trinitarian theology. The younger brother of Basil the Great and fr...

• Clement of Alexandria 150 AD – 215 AD · Greek

  Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria, was a Christian theologian and the first major teacher of the catechetical school at Alexandria, where he helped to shape ...

• Plato 428 BC – 348 BC · Greek

  Plato was an Athenian philosopher and the founder of the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. A student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, ...

• Origen 185 AD – 253 AD · Greek-Egyptian

  Origen of Alexandria was an early Christian theologian and biblical scholar, the most important and most controversial of the Greek Fathers of the Church. He produced the Hexapl...

• Philo of Larissa c. 159 BC – c. 84 BC · Greek

  Philo of Larissa was the last head of the skeptical Platonic Academy and the teacher of Cicero in Rome. The successor of Clitomachus, he gradually moderated the radical skeptici...

• Iamblichus 245 AD – 325 AD · Syrian-Greek

  Iamblichus of Chalcis was a Syrian Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the founder of the Syrian school of Neoplatonism. Departing from Plotinus and Porphyry, he held that intell...

• Plotinus c. 204 – 270 · Greek-Egyptian

  Plotinus was a 3rd-century philosopher of late antiquity, born in Roman Egypt and active in Rome, where he founded the philosophical school whose teaching is preserved in the En...

• Plutarch 46 AD – 119 AD · Greek

  Plutarch of Chaeronea was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, biographer, and priest at Delphi. His Parallel Lives paired famous Greeks with famous Romans to illuminate the mo...

• Arcesilaus 316 BC – 241 BC · Greek

  Arcesilaus of Pitane was a Greek philosopher and the founder of the New, or skeptical, Academy. As head of Plato's school he turned its dialectical method against the dogmatic c...

• Crantor c. 340 BC – c. 275 BC · Greek

  Crantor of Soli was a Greek philosopher of the Old Academy and the first systematic commentator on Plato's Timaeus. A pupil of Xenocrates and the close friend and associate of P...

• Porphyry 234 AD – 305 AD · Phoenician-Greek

  Porphyry of Tyre was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the most important pupil of Plotinus. He edited and arranged his teacher's writings into the Enneads, prefacing them wi...

• Proclus 412 AD – 485 AD · Greek

  Proclus Lycius was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the last great head of the Platonic Academy at Athens. He systematized the Neoplatonic tradition inherited from Plotinus ...

• Simplicius c. 490 AD – c. 560 AD · Greek

  Simplicius of Cilicia was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the last great commentator on Aristotle in the Athenian tradition. After the closure of the Platonic Academy by Ju...

• Photios I c. 810 – 893 · Byzantine

  Photios I, called the Great, was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and twice Patriarch of Constantinople, the most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium and one of the princ...

• Alcinous c. 100 AD – c. 175 AD · Greek

  Alcinous was a Greek philosopher of the second century AD and the author of the Handbook of Platonism, the principal surviving systematic introduction to Middle Platonist doctri...

• Henry More 1614 – 1687 · English

  Henry More was an English philosopher and one of the foremost Cambridge Platonists. A fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, for nearly half a century, he defended the immateria...

• Marsilio Ficino 1433 – 1499 · Italian

  Marsilio Ficino was an Italian Renaissance philosopher, priest, and physician at the court of the Medici in Florence. He produced the first complete Latin translation of the dia...

• Ralph Cudworth 1617 – 1688 · English

  Ralph Cudworth was an English philosopher, theologian, and the leading figure of the Cambridge Platonist school. As Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, he produced The True...

• Macrobius c. 370 AD – c. 430 AD · Roman

  Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius was a Latin grammarian, philosopher, and Neoplatonist of the late Roman Empire and one of the principal transmitters of late ancient learning to t...

• Bernard of Chartres c. 1080 – c. 1130 · French

  Bernard of Chartres was a French Latin Platonist of the early twelfth century, master and chancellor of the cathedral school of Chartres, and one of the most influential teacher...

• Damascius 458 AD – 538 AD · Syrian-Greek

  Damascius was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the last head of the Platonic Academy at Athens before its closure under the emperor Justinian in 529. After fleeing briefly t...

• Gemistus Pletho c. 1355 – 1452 · Byzantine

  George Gemistos, who took the name Plethon to recall his master Plato, was a late-Byzantine philosopher of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the most original Platonist of...

• Maximus of Tyre c. 125 AD – c. 185 AD · Greek

  Maximus of Tyre was a Greek Platonist philosopher of the Roman Empire who lectured at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere during the reign of Commodus. Forty-one of his short Dissertati...

• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite c. 475 AD – c. 525 AD · Syrian

  Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the conventional name given to an anonymous late-fifth or early-sixth-century Christian theologian who wrote in Greek under the persona of the...

• Maximus the Confessor 580 AD – 662 AD · Greek

  Maximus the Confessor was a seventh-century Greek Christian monk and theologian and one of the great architects of Eastern patristic thought. After service in the imperial court...

• Aleksei Losev 1893 – 1988 · Russian

  Aleksei Losev was a Russian philosopher, classicist, and historian of philosophy, the last great Russian neoplatonist of the Silver Age, who survived imprisonment in the Stalini...

• Ammonius Hermiae c. 440 AD – c. 520 AD · Greek

  Ammonius Hermiae was a Greek Alexandrian Neoplatonist philosopher and the principal teacher of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in the eastern Mediterranean in the late fift...

• Ammonius Saccas c. 175 AD – c. 242 AD · Egyptian-Greek

  Ammonius Saccas was a Greek philosopher of Alexandria and the founding teacher of Neoplatonism. The little we know of his life comes from his pupils, especially Plotinus and Ori...

• Antiochus of Ascalon 130 BC – 68 BC · Greek

  Antiochus of Ascalon was a Greek philosopher who broke with the skeptical New Academy of Carneades and Philo of Larissa to revive a positive, dogmatic Platonism. As head of the ...

• Aristides Quintilianus c. 250 – c. 350 · Greek

  Aristides Quintilianus was a Greek philosophical music theorist of late antiquity, the author of the most extensive surviving ancient treatise on music, On Music in three books,...

• Asclepigenia of Athens c. 430 – c. 485 · Greek

  Asclepigenia of Athens was a fifth-century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the daughter of Plutarch of Athens, the head of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy. Marinus's Life of...

• Bernard Silvestris c. 1085 – c. 1178 · French

  Bernard Silvestris was a Latin Platonist philosopher and poet of the twelfth-century Renaissance, master at the cathedral school of Tours, and one of the central figures of the ...

• Carneades 214 BC – 129 BC · Greek

  Carneades of Cyrene was a Greek philosopher and the most important head of the New Academy, the skeptical phase of Plato's school. He was famous for his ability to argue with eq...

• Chalcidius c. 320 – c. 400 · Roman

  Chalcidius was a Latin philosopher and Christian thinker of late antiquity, whose Latin translation of the first part of Plato's Timaeus and his accompanying Commentary on the T...

• Crates of Athens c. 350 BC – c. 268 BC · Greek

  Crates of Athens was a Greek philosopher and the fifth head of the Platonic Academy after Polemo, succeeding around 270 BC. Together with his slightly older friend Polemo, who h...

• Francesco Patrizi 1529 – 1597 · Italian

  Francesco Patrizi da Cherso was an Italian Renaissance Platonist philosopher, polymath, and the first holder of a chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara, later moving to a corr...

• Heraclides Ponticus c. 387 BC – c. 312 BC · Greek

  Heraclides Ponticus was a Greek philosopher of the early Academy, born at Heraclea on the Pontus and trained at Athens under Plato. A polymath of extraordinary range, he wrote o...

• John Italos c. 1023 – c. 1090 · Byzantine

  John Italos was a Byzantine philosopher of the eleventh century, born in southern Italy of Norman parents, who studied in Constantinople under Michael Psellos and succeeded him ...

• John Philoponus c. 490 AD – c. 570 AD · Greek

  John Philoponus was a Greek Alexandrian Christian philosopher, theologian, and Aristotelian commentator of late antiquity. A pupil of the Neoplatonist Ammonius Hermiae, he produ...

• Lastheneia of Mantinea c. 380 BC – c. 320 BC · Greek

  Lastheneia of Mantinea was a Greek Platonist philosopher of the fourth century BC, one of the very few women known to have studied at Plato's Academy in Athens. According to Dio...

• Macrina the Younger c. 327 – 379 · Cappadocian

  Macrina the Younger was a Cappadocian Christian philosopher and theologian, the elder sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, who shaped the early monastic communities o...

• Marius Victorinus c. 290 AD – c. 364 AD · Roman

  Gaius Marius Victorinus was a Roman rhetorician, grammarian, Neoplatonist philosopher, and Latin Christian theologian whose late conversion in Rome around 355 became a pattern t...

• Mark Eugenikos 1392 – 1444 · Byzantine

  Mark Eugenikos was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and Metropolitan of Ephesus, who attended the Council of Florence of 1438-39 as the principal philosophical and theologic...

• Michael Psellos 1018 – 1078 · Byzantine

  Michael Psellos was a Byzantine philosopher, statesman, and historian, the leading intellectual of eleventh-century Constantinople, and the principal figure in the Platonist rev...

• Nemesius of Emesa c. 350 – c. 420 · Syrian

  Nemesius of Emesa was a late-fourth-century Christian philosopher and bishop in Syria, whose On the Nature of Man fused the inheritance of Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and the Stoic...

• Numenius of Apamea c. 150 AD – c. 200 AD · Greek-Syrian

  Numenius of Apamea was a Greek-Syrian Pythagorean and Middle Platonist philosopher and one of the most important precursors of Plotinus and Neoplatonism. His doctrine of three g...

• Pico della Mirandola 1463 – 1494 · Italian

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian Renaissance humanist and philosopher, a member of the Florentine circle around Marsilio Ficino. At twenty-three he proposed to defen...

• Polemo c. 350 BC – c. 270 BC · Greek

  Polemo of Athens was a Greek philosopher and the fourth scholarch of the Platonic Academy, succeeding Xenocrates and presiding over the school for nearly forty years until his d...

• Sosipatra of Ephesus c. 350 – c. 410 · Greek

  Sosipatra of Ephesus was a fourth-century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher of late antiquity, whose teaching and prophetic activity in the city of Pergamum is recorded in Eunapius...

• Speusippus c. 408 BC – c. 339 BC · Greek

  Speusippus was a Greek philosopher of Athens, the nephew of Plato, and his successor as scholarch of the Academy from 347 BC to his death in 339 BC. He broke with Plato on the t...

• Synesius of Cyrene c. 370 AD – c. 414 AD · Greek-Roman

  Synesius of Cyrene was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and Christian bishop of Ptolemais in Roman Libya. A pupil of Hypatia at Alexandria, to whom he addressed several of his f...

• Theodore Metochites 1270 – 1332 · Byzantine

  Theodore Metochites was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, statesman, and poet of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the prime minister of the emperor Androniko...

• Xenocrates c. 396 BC – c. 314 BC · Greek

  Xenocrates of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher of the early Academy and the third scholarch after Plato and Speusippus, holding the office for twenty-five years. He systematize...

• Hypatia of Alexandria c. 360 – 415 · Greek-Egyptian

  Hypatia of Alexandria was a late ancient Greek-Egyptian philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer of the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, the most prominent woman phil...