Abstract

Dominic O'Meara has produced a scholarly and sympathetic account of a most enigmatic subject, namely, the role of mathematics in late Greek Platonic thought. O'Meara traces the path of mathematical philosophy from the Neopythagoreanism of the second and third centuries A.D. through that master of Athenian Neoplatonism, Proclus. Without this study few would recognize the paradigmatic role that mathematics played in Platonic thinkers throughout this period, for mathematics became the model for many forms of philosophical inquiry--not only theology and physics, but even ethics.