- Lived:
- c. 234–305 CE · Tyre (Phoenicia), Athens, Rome, Sicily
- Tradition:
- Neoplatonism — its great systematizer, editor, and logician
- The Big Idea:
- Philosophy is a curriculum: master Aristotle's logic as the doorway, then climb toward Plato's One — and organize everything, from concepts to souls, into ordered trees.
- In their words:
- "Whether genera and species really exist or reside in bare thoughts alone... I shall refuse to say: for such a question is very deep, and requires a greater inquiry."
- If you remember one thing:
- The same man wrote the most-read philosophy textbook of the next thousand years and the most feared attack on Christianity ever written — and the empire that burned the second couldn't function without the first.