Enrico Volpe

With respect to Parmenides’ thought Melissus was regarded as a dissident thinker already in antiquity. His polemical introduction of the concept of void and the relative idea of infinite Being seemed particularly controversial. The aim of the present paper is to examine the origins of the Melissian understanding of void in order to trace its philosophical genesis to the criticism of the Atomist Leucippus. According to the philosopher from Abdera, the Eleatic fundamental principles had to conform to the obviousness of bodies’ motion, which is why the Eleatic not-Being had to be understood as void. Melissus took issue with this view and criticized the idea of the void’s reality by means of a methodical argument. In the course of doing so, the philosopher from Samos distorted the original Parmenidean ontology, which is why his theories were often criticized severely as theoretically weak.

The metaphysical system of Numenius of Apamea is structured according to an onto-theological hierarchy, which presents three levels of reality that Numenius calls “Gods”. Even though the role of the first and the second God is of paramount importance in the metaphysics of Numenius, the third God, which is also defined “cosmos”, has a troublesome ontological status. According to Numenius, the cosmos has “dianoetic thought” since his nature derives from the “encounter” of two metaphysical principles: the demiurge and the matter. My investigation starts from the testimony of Proclus and then it focuses on Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica, in which he quotes directly some passages from the work of Numenius On the Good. My goal in this article is to show that Numenius conceives the third God not as the cosmos in a material sense, but rather as the rational principle which rules the universe. In this respect, the discursive intellect and the divine nature of the cos- mos seem to fit well together. The main question, however, concerns the possibility that Numenius understands the presence (or the identification) of the cosmos with a World Soul. My purpose is to show that even though Numenius does not define the third God explicitly as a “Soul”, its rational principle works as a Soul. Finally, I try to show that this conception of third God by Numenius lays the ground for the Plotinian concept of the Third Hypostasis.

The problem of the interpretation of the Timaeus represents one of the greatest exegetical challenges for Plotinus. For Plotinus the Timaeus is a problematic dialogue due to its mythical-allegorical language and the fact that some doctrines in the work seem incompatible with his hypostatic vision. The Plotinian conception of the demiurge is critical of the concept of “artisanal causality.” Plotinus does not agree that the cosmos could have been generated according to a plan, i.e., according to dianoetic and contingent reasoning. At the same time, he identifies the demiurge with the Intellect, but then, in other treatises, also equates the demiurge with the world soul and nature, i.e., the aspect of the third hypostasis that has the task of acting directly on matter. While this ambiguity of Plotinus is found in several places of his Enneads, it finds justification in a spurious dialogue of Plato, the Epinomis, in which the role of the demiurgic soul is central. In my opinion, Plotinus is likely to have taken his cue from the Epinomis as an endorsement for his doctrine of the demiurgic soul. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the identification of the demiurgic soul with a single hypostasis leads Plotinus to several aporias.

The myth in Plotinus is a constitutive element of his metaphysics, as it is present in several treatises of the Enneads as an element aimed at justifying certain metaphysical theses through recourse to an analogy with the ancient tradition. In the case of the divine triad Ouranos‑Kronos‑Zeus, the relationship is extremely problematic since, from a Platonic perspective, these figures relate to two dialogues in particular : the Cratylus and the Timaeus. Regarding the Cratylus, the greatest difficulty for Plotinus lies in matching the Socratic etymological method with the actual nature of the hypostases. From this point of view, the role of Ouranos appears particularly problematic since the very nature of the first principle is incompatible with Platonic etymology. As far as the Timaeus is concerned, a fundamental role is that of Zeus as demiurge, which respects all the problematic nature of the Plotinian perspective, which is unable to precisely delineate the role of the demiurge, for which Zeus is twofold : Intellect and Soul. It thus emerges how the role of the Cratylus and Timaeus are merely strategic for Plotinus, called upon only to justify his metaphysical theses. The myth thus has the role of justifying an analogy between the metaphysics of hypostasis and the archaic tradition, but it presents problems of interpretative oscillation that Plotinus himself does not seem able to resolve.

Numenius is an author who straddles the line between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. In this contribution, I focus on the differences between the second and the third God, which emerge from analyses of the relevant fragments. Numenius emphasizes, on several occasions, how the second God (i.e., the demiurge) has a dual nature. In this paper, I investigate the role of the demiurge in Numenius and examine in what sense the second and third God are “one.” On the one hand, Numenius seems to be stressing the unity of the second and third levels of reality, but on the other hand, he also appears to be differentiating them. The present analyses concentrate on fragments 19F, 24F, 29T and 30T (respectively 11, 16, 21, and 22 in des Places’ edition). My purpose is to demonstrate that, according to Numenius, the second and the third God are one because they both can be regarded as demiurgic. Thus, Numenius conceives a kind of “double demiurgy,” which preserves the distinction between the second and the third God, who are distinguished from an ontological point of view, but who, at the same time, share a demiurgic function. The second God is then the paradigm, whereas the third God is immanent in matter as a ruling principle of the cosmos, which is similar to the World Soul, as he operates on matter in order to make it rationally ordered.

Numenio appartiene all’ambito degli interpreti medioplatonici dei dialoghi di Platone; nel Medioplatonismo, infatti, si diffuse la tendenza a interpretare la filosofia di Platone come in chiave sistematica. Il dialogo più rilevante per questa operazione esegetica nel Medioplatonismo fu certamente il Timeo. In questo contributo intendo concentrarmi sull’interpretazione delle pagine 28a-29a del Timeo da parte di Numenio di Apamea ed esaminarne l’esegesi alla luce della sua prospettiva onto-teologica. Nel Timeo, l’utilizzo del verbo βλέπω ha la funzione di descrivere il fatto che il demiurgo è contemplativo nei confronti del paradigma intelligibile. In Numenio, invece, l’associazione del verbo βλέπω al demiurgo è volta a mostrare il ruolo di mediatore che il secondo dio svolge tra il primo principio e la materia. In questo modo si mostrerà come i passi del Timeo vengano interpretati da Numenio alla luce della sua metafisica dualista.

Numenius is one of the most important authors who, in the Imperial Age, deal with the figure of Socrates. Socrates is important in the Platon­ic tradition, in particular in the sceptical tradition, when the Socratic dubitative “spirit” of the first Platonic dialogues became important to justify the “suspension of judgement.” Numenius criticises the whole Academic tradition by saying that the Academics (particularly the sceptics) betrayed the original doctrine of Plato and formulated a new image of Socrates. For Numenius, Socrates plays a central role because Plato would have inherited his doctrine. What does Socrates’s doctrine consist in? According to Numenius, Socrates theorised a “doctrine of three Gods” (which can be likely found in the second Platonic epistle) which is strictly bound up with the main aspect of Plato’s thought. In fact, in Numenius’s view, Plato belongs to a genealogy which can be linked to Pythagoras himself. From this perspective, Numenius says that Socrates’s original thought is a theology which also belongs to the Pythagorean tradition and which Plato further developed. For Nume­nius, Socrates is not the philosopher of doubt, but a theologian who first theorised the existence of three levels of reality (Gods), which is also the kernel of Numenius’s metaphysical system. For this reason, Numenius puts Socrates within a theological genealogy that begins with Pythago­ras and continues with Socrates and Plato, and that the Academics and the Socratics failed to understand.