The decline and fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato

Tigerstedt's purpose, in this brief but useful survey of a vast topic, is to trace the development in Western attitudes to the relationship between Plato, Neoplatonism, and, to a lesser extent, the New Academy from St. Augustine to Hegel. 

 The book is valuable in two respects: it makes available in concise form the results of scholarly work in widely disparate areas; and it highlights certain hitherto neglected or under-emphasized individual stages in the history of Platonic studies. As examples of the latter one could mention: the recognition of the aporetic, unsystematic Plato of the Dialogues by Leonardo Bruni in the early fifteenth century (p. 32) and its influence on Philip Melanchthon's Declamations a century later (pp. 32—5); the neglected but important Introduction by Ioannes Serranus to the 1578 Stephanus edition of Plato, in which the Plato of the Dialogues is liberated both from Neoplatonic systematization and Academic scepticism (pp. 39—43)—a new phase in the history of Platonic scholarship; the clear genealogy of the separation of Platonism from Neoplatonism by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians of philosophy from Vossius to Olearius, Brucker, the Zedler, and Diderot's Encyclopedic (pp. 51—62). Some topics are revealed to require further research: apart from the Platonic studies of Serranus, one notes, in the English tradition alone, the absence of recent work on William Grocyn, the humanist friend of Colet and More, and a pioneer critic, in 1501, of the authenticity of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (p. 29), and the neglect of the late-seventeenth-century nonconformist divine, Theophilus Gale, whose work The Court of the Gentiles drew heavily on Serranus and earlier Protestant attacks on Neoplatonism's alleged evil influence on Christianity (pp. 45—7).