ABSTRACT
Up until fairly recently, a majority of scholars might have balked at the suggestion that Neoplatonists had any serious interest – let alone any contribution to make – in the natural sciences and in particular in ancient medicine. is reaction re ects a rather uncharitable view of the Neoplatonic project, according to which the sensible world fails to warrant any sustained scienti c investigation on account of its being a mere image of the true object of investigation, namely the intelligible cosmos, with the result that Neoplatonists focused their attention on other pursuits.2 In fact, as scholars are now coming to see, things are the other way round: the sensible cosmos is a particularly worthy object of study precisely because it is an image of the intelligible cosmos. As a result Neoplatonic natural philosophy is currently receiving a level of attention that it has not enjoyed for centuries.3
