CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Theologou, Anastasia |
|---|---|
| Title | Plotinus' Sympatheia and Its Philosophical Foundations: Towards a Comprehensive Approach |
| Summary | The general aim of this thesis is to show that Plotinus’ concept of cosmic sympatheia (a term that I translate throughout this dissertation as “community of affections,” or “shared affections) can be considered a unified ontological structure, in which all the beings within the universe are interconnected in a world arranged and ordered by the Platonic highest principles. Thus, for Plotinus, there is a community of affections between all the living beings in the cosmos, because the world has all the characteristics of a living organism. Evidently, this view is based on Plato’s Timaeus but – as I will suggest in what follows – it is also influenced by the long reception of the texts of the Platonic corpus during the Hellenistic and early imperial periods. Galen’s philosophical speculations squeezed from his experience as a physician and medical theorist offer an excellent window to this reception and are used extensively in this thesis; at the same time, Galen’s work had an important impact on Plotinus’ own philosophical system. |
| Supervisor | Perczel Istvan |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/theologou_anastasia.pdf |
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