ABSTRACT
Besides the more practical and this-worldly emphasis, recent research is marked, thirdly, by the substantial advance of both historical and philosophical interpretations. Historically, Neoplatonism is now treated as a continuation of the Classical and Hellenistic heritage rather than an introspective curiosity from late antiquity the main outcome of which is the conceptual rmament of Christian ideology. e picture of the relationship of Neoplatonism with other schools of thought, both philosophical and religious, is rapidly becoming more concrete. e philosophical purport of this is to see, for example, Neoplatonic metaphysical hierarchy – the proliferation of entities as well as levels – as a series of attempts to address philosophical problems detected or le behind by earlier thinkers such as Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. In the same vein, the study of the relationship between metaphysics and theology or metaphysics and mathematics – to give just two pairs of examples among many – has outgrown the limitations of scepticism to reveal a sound philosophically based communication. ereby the new research in metaphysics, mathematics and theology has become more and more problem-oriented rather than strictly descriptive. As a result, the writing of a commentary on a single work has been supplemented by the analytical explication of a particular problem or a concept, sometimes within a single author, at others across time and divergent views.
