Acknowledgements

One is reminded in completing writing on a philosophical topic—especially on Platonism(!)—of the irony of going against Socrates’ judgment against the written form for philosophical discourse, rather than dialectical discourse between living souls, from Plato’s Phaedrus (275d–277a). Indeed, although this book has broken that rule (like every Platonist), it must be vigorously maintained that setting this study’s argument in hard, lifeless ink and paper could in no way be done without the many, countless live souls who helped me reach this point on the long road to grasping (if initially) Proclus and Damascius.

With this in mind, I wish first and foremost to thank my two supervisors and mentors, Peter Adamson and Jan Opsomer, for their acute insight and critical role in helping me formulate and develop my arguments, especially in interpreting the dense of series of texts that underlie this study. Their support and patience in the difficult process of writing and revising is one for which I will be forever grateful. Furthermore, I wish to thank Inna Kupreeva for her help in guiding me on this path from my time in Edinburgh (2012–2014) during my early postgraduate work on Plotinus and Proclus, and moreover for her sharp insights and advice with earlier drafts of this study.

I also wish to thank a number of friends who had the patience and generosity in helping to review early drafts of this work in both its dissertation and manuscript form: especially Evan King, Laura Castelli, Antonio Vargas, Fedor Benevich, and Bethany Somma.

As much of this book was written during my doctoral studies between 2014–2017, I wish to thank the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy (musaΦ) at the lmu Munich for their generous financial support during this time. I also wish to thank my colleagues while in Munich for their help and support in various presentations and feedback: Sergei Mariev (especially for his gracious willingness to be an external reader in my doctoral disputation), Christof Rapp, Chris Noble, Antonio Ferro, Máté Herner, Andreas Lammer, Melina Vogiatzi, and Marilù Papandreou.

I also wish to thank the community at ku Leuven during my visit in March, 2017, especially Pieter d’Hoine, Carlos Steel, Albert Kobec, and Irini Fotini Viltanioti for their critical feedback when I presented my work there. In other presentations and conversation, I wish to thank for their critical feedback and generous help Christoph Horn, Denis Walter, Christoph Helmig (especially for his felicitous suggestion to pursue researching the One’s causality in Damascius), Stephen Menn, George Boys-Stones, Philip Horky, Marije Martijn, David Butorac, Daniel Watson, Alan Brown, and Gonzalo Gamarra Jordan. I have been very fortunate to have had the time to discuss the issues in my study with these people, for which I am grateful.

As the final form of this book was revised during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Medieval Research in the Austrian Academy of Sciences, I wish to thank Dragos Calma, Pavlina Rychterova, and Walter Pohl for their generous and gracious support during this time (especially while enduring the unprecedented global Coronavirus pandemic at the final stage in revising). I also wish to express my gratitude to the European Research Council for their financial support in preparing the book form of this study, within the framework of the project, NeoplAT (ERC_CoG_771640). And of course, many thanks to Frans de Haas and an anonymous reviewer for their help and critical feedback in revising and editing the work into its current book form.

Last but not least, I wish to express gratitude for the generous support and encouragement of many personal friends—among others, Dominic O’Reilly and Aaron Ortner for their stimulating conversations with me on Neoplatonist principles, while remaining ardent Aristotelians. And finally I wish to thank my parents, Gary and Catherine Greig, and other family for their constant moral support over these years. My stability and inner wellbeing has greatly depended on these people, for which I will always be in their debt.

Vienna

Holy Week 2020