Philosophical Essentialism, Intellectual Hybridity, and the Invention of “Neoplatonism”

This study argues that “Neoplatonism” was an invention of western European scholarship that defined this supposedly monolithic school of philosophy through colonial discourse, and, specifically, through hybridity and Orientalist discourse. To portray late Platonic philosophy thus, western scholars first reified Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Orientalism into intellectually irreconcilable and sometimes diametrically opposed philosophies, and then argued that their combination yielded an inferior, bastardized, new essence: Neoplatonism. The article examines how these essentialist assumptions have historically constricted the epistemological horizons of scholarship on Late Antiquity through an overview of representative publications from the past 150 years on three philosophically inclined early Christians: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximos. The article also provides a competing account of late Platonism by examining relevant nineteenth-century Russian scholarship on the same subject, which is most notable for its absence of hybridity and Orientalist discourse and the insistence on Neoplatonism being a valid form of Greek philosophy.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .