The Philosophy of Proclus: The Final Phase of Ancient Thought

By Laurence Jay Rosan. Laurence Jay Rosan's The Philosophy of Proclus, subtitled The Final Phase of Ancient Thought, has long been considered one of the finest overviews of late Platonic teaching: first published in 1949 it helped bring about a re-evaluation of Proclus and his work by modern scholars. Its clear and sympathetic approach to its subject allows the reader to follow, in the words of Rosan, "one of the most fascinating dialectics the human mind has conceived." The philosophy of Proclus, built as it was on over a thousand years of vigorous development by a series of profound philosophers and theologians, represents the last age in the West in which the highest human endeavours in philosophy, religion, science and art, were still united and integrated. In Proclus we find philosophy as inner discipline - as a path to enlightenment - and his writings represent a fruition of a tradition which can be traced back though Iamblichus, Plotinus, Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides, Pythagoras