Ancient Greece & Rome · School
Neoplatonism
Plotinus developed Plato's Forms into a system of emanation from the One through Intellect to Soul, deeply shaping Christian and Islamic theology.
Representative figures · 9
Plotinus普罗提诺
Founder of Neoplatonism, who raised Plato's Forms toward the One, from which all things emanate and to which the soul longs to return.
Augustine of Hippo奥古斯丁
Grafted Platonism onto Christianity, wrote the first autobiography, and shaped the Western mind for a thousand years with his reflections on sin, grace and time.
Boethius波爱修斯
The last Roman and the first scholastic, who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in a condemned cell and preserved Aristotle's logic for the Middle Ages.
John Scotus Eriugena爱留根纳
The one original philosopher of the Carolingian age, who brought Greek mystical theology into Latin and built a vast system in which God and nature are one.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina)阿维森纳（伊本·西那）
Giant of Islamic philosophy and medicine, who distinguished essence from existence, devised the 'flying man' thought experiment, and shaped Latin scholastic metaphysics.
Meister Eckhart埃克哈特大师
Father of German mysticism, who preached that in the soul's depths there is a spark no different from God, and taught 'letting go' of all things so that God may be born within.
Nicholas of Cusa库萨的尼古拉
'Learned ignorance': God is the coincidence of opposites, the universe has neither centre nor edge, and the infinite is to be approached through mathematical figures.
Pico della Mirandola皮科·德拉·米兰多拉
At twenty-three he challenged all Europe to debate nine hundred theses; his Oration on the Dignity of Man declared that humans may make of themselves whatever they choose.
Giordano Bruno布鲁诺
Preached an infinite universe with countless worlds; the Inquisition burned him in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, and he became the martyr of free thought.