El neoplatonismo y sus irradiaciones en algunos momentos de la historia de la Filosofía Occidental

During the last decades academic research has proliferated on the influences of late-ancient thinking in successive stages of the history of philosophy. Among these, it stands out Neoplatonism, an intellectual position that constitutes the starting point of this research. It should be noted that the expression Neoplatonism is recent. It was coined in the eighteenth century with the aim to differentiate Plato’s philosophy from the doctrine of Plotinus and his followers. This school developed between the third and the sixth centuries, and among its main representatives are Plotinus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Proclus, Damascius and Simplicius. Four thematic subjects (causality, knowledge, metaphysics and theology) have been selected to address the study of the following philosophers: Porphyry, Marius Victorinus, Augustine of Hippo, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Bergson and Deleuze. In this sense, the successes and scope of three research works on the subject of “agnosia” in Porphyry were analyzed. The need to properly rethink the question of the vocabulary of the term “gnosis” and other related concepts in the Porphyrian corpus was verified. For this purpose, we sought to study the relations between the philosopher and Gnosticism. In addition, the analysis was extended through a historical point (a), and two philosophical ones (b) and (c): (a) as for the Neoplatonism of Augustine and Marius Victorinus, Porphyry stood out as one of the common sources; (b) with respect to Victorinus’s negative theology, his contribution was emphasized; and (c) referring to the problem of the knowledge of God in Augustine, we corroborated that its starting point is concordant with that of the Rhetor. The proposal and interpretation of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas about the Liber de Causis was also described, highlighting the differences, both in the question of origin and in the conception of causality, leading the research to the Greek-Arab origins of the writing. As for the study of the relations between Plotinus and Bergson, two lines of parallel research have begun to be followed, which have not yet concluded: the translation of the “Cours sur Plotin” (with its critical apparatus) and the study of the influence of Bergsonian Neoplatonism in France.