Recognizing God in Jesus may be the goal of belief, but one must ask whether God himself is available for recognition. Chapter 2, ‘Divine Visibility’, argues that John’s Christology affirms the visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an ‘unseen’ God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as ‘no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]’. Three pieces of evidence support this claim, chief among them a survey of Early Jewish, biblical, and Rabbinic literature revealing that one may not assume that all – or, perhaps, even many – Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. If one reads John’s God as ‘unseen’, rather than as ‘invisible’, the visibility of God in Jesus becomes possible and the tension between the seeing and not seeing God passages can be resolved.

Hume’s ‘four essays on happiness’ are distinctive in Hume’s oeuvre, and not merely in the 1741 volume of Essays, Moral and Political in which they appeared. They are written in the style of philosophical monologues, with Hume ‘personating’ a representative of each of the main, late Hellenistic philosophical sects in turn. Each such representative, however, engages critically with the philosophical positions staked out by his rivals and antagonists. The ultimate question each of the philosophical sects seeks to answer is: what is the true end (summum bonum) of human life, and where is true contentment to be found? Scholars have tended to be preoccupied with the question of which sect best articulates Hume’s own underlying philosophical commitments. This chapter argues that such an approach is mistaken, because Hume dismissed the quest for the summum bonum altogether. Hume presented all the late Hellenistic philosophical sects as capturing something important about human life, and about the purpose of philosophical activity. Yet ancient moral philosophers had ultimately failed to develop the ‘science of man’ that Hume took to be the greatest achievement of modern philosophy. The four essays, then, reveal Hume’s keen – and lifelong – interest in the history of moral philosophy, and his attentiveness to the distinctive (and superior) character of modern approaches to the discipline.

This chapter considers Irish Murdoch’s torn feelings about the role of philosophy in fiction. Such ambivalence, I argue, expresses her broader concerns about the role of ‘ideas’ both in art and in life. Murdochs’s novels are often embarrassed by their own conceptuality and yearn for a more brute contact with the world that has no recourse to the mediating role of ideas and theories. But this wish is also exposed as a fantasy in her work. Literature in Murdoch is a form of thought and is subject to its limitations. Not only does it rely on concepts, it is also pulled between different aspects of thinking: between particular and general viewpoints and inner and outer perspectives. As I show, the friction between these modes of thought accounts for the uneven form and philosophical power of Murdoch’s fiction.

Assessments of Lucian’s attitude towards philosophy have tended to focus on how much he really knew about philosophy, which school he preferred, and if his texts can be read as philosophy. This chapter argues that Lucian’s attitude is best understood as reflecting the central position philosophy occupied in imperial elite culture. As Lucian satirises elite paideia from within that same paideia, criticising imperial philosophy implied assuming a philosophical stance or appropriating philosophical concepts and vocabulary. Lucian explores themes that were current in philosophical discourse of the Roman Empire, such as the expectation of matching doctrine and deed, salaries for philosophical education, and ancient wisdom. Whilst he shows awareness of technical terminology, his writings are mostly concerned with protreptic and the question if one has to dedicate oneself fully to a philosophical life. His ubiquitous satire, even in works deemed ‘more serious’, does not permit firm conclusions about Lucian’s own ideas and solicits multiple interpretations on the part of the reader.

This chapter demonstrates that the doctrines contained in the Consolatio philosophiae unite and reconcile, in an elegant and balanced way, pagan Platonist philosophy and Christian faith. The most fertile ground for verifying this thesis is the third book of the Consolatio, with its Timaeus-inspired O qui perpetua hymn (III.m9), its talk of deification (III.10.24–5), its biblical paraphrase of Wisdom 8:1 (III.12.22), and its account of God understood in terms of happiness, goodness, and unity. As Boethius tells us in his second commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation (80.1–6), he thought that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were, if properly interpreted, complementary expressions of one truth. I argue that Boethius took a similar view regarding pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity: although on the surface there might be some disagreement, both can be harmonized in such a way as to offer complementary expressions of the one truth. The pagan and Christian references in Book III support the conclusion that the Consolation enacts a harmonization of pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity without distorting either.

This concluding chapter offers some final thoughts on the nature of Cambridge Platonism in light of the analysis provided in the main body of the book. It is argued that while there are real and significant differences in the way each of the Cambridge Platonists engage with Platonic ideas and texts, they share a core set of distinctive philosophical intuitions that set them apart quite clearly as a distinct school of Christian Platonists. It is this philosophical framework that binds Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith together into a coherent group of philosophers, even when the diversity of their motivations and intellectual orientations are taken into account.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

This chapter considers whether and in what way Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith can be called ‘Platonists’. Was Platonism a part of the story they told about themselves, or that their contemporaries told about them, or is it simply an anachronistic label invented by modern scholarship? I argue that ‘Platonism’ was a live intellectual category in the Cambridge Platonists’ seventeenth-century philosophical and theological context and denoted a particular set of doctrinal positions which were associated with ancient Platonism, such as the primacy of God’s goodness over his will. The chapter also investigates evidence of a surge of interest in ancient and Renaissance Platonism at Cambridge in the latter half of the 1630s, centred at Emmanuel College, which included John Sadler, Peter Sterry and Laurence Sarson and also coincides with Henry More’s discovery of Platonism, and Cudworth’s early Platonic letters to John Stoughton. It is argued that these developments provide important context for the origins of Cambridge Platonism, and illuminate the ways in which Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s intellectual development was shaped by engagement with Platonic texts and ideas.

In ‘Platonist Notions and Forms’, Mauro Bonazzi explores an aspect of the Platonists’ engagement with Stoic epistemology, namely the Platonists’ appropriation of the Stoic ennoiai, conceptions or notions, to show that Plato’s doctrine can provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of the foundation of knowledge, which Stoicism has proved unable to solve. The Stoic ennoiai, (conceptions) or phusikai ennoiai (natural conceptions) are notions naturally arising in the human mind and constituting the basic elements of human reason. They are ‘natural’ in the sense that humans are naturally disposed to acquire them, and they are koinai (common) in the sense that all humans have them or are disposed to have them. They are also invariably true and therefore can serve as criteria in order to increase knowledge, promote scientific understanding and contribute to the good life. It is these ennoiai that the Platonists integrate in their own reinvention of Plato’s epistemology and employ in their polemics against their principal rivals.

In Chapter 9, I move the focus from epistemology to ontology. I ask what kind of objects natural numbers are and show why different types of realist answers are problematic. I then endorse a constructivist account, according to which natural numbers exist as social constructs through our shared number concepts. This account is compatible with the social constructivist views of Cole and Feferman. However, I see my account as an improvement on their work because it provides a strong explanation as to why numbers are widely applicable social constructs. This explanation is based on the important role that proto-arithmetical abilities have both for the way we experience our environment and the development of arithmetic. Finally, I discuss the question of whether natural numbers as social constructs exist primarily as ordinals or cardinals, showing that, although more empirical research is needed, there is no reason to currently believe that natural numbers must be fundamentally ordinal.

This chapter finds that Augustine self-consciously departed from Stoicism and Platonism (while remaining within eudaimonism) in finding that there were other natural objects of human beings’ eros-love besides the highest good. This finding leads to a new explanation of Augustine’s distinction between use and enjoyment and to a new explanation of his view that grief would be found not only in the lives of the vicious but in the lives of the virtuous as well.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

This chapter asks whether Augustine criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics, or whether he criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that these philosophies had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself. It finds that the latter explanation is correct: in reaching this conclusion, this chapter establishes that Augustine defined virtue and vice, or sin, from within the eudaimonist tradition, making use of the ideas of love as eros and philia, and of the highest good, or summum bonum.

While scholarship has always underlined Philo’s debt to the preceding philosophical tradition, this chapter instead intends to shed light on his critical attitude towards some key traditional aspects of prophecy and divination endorsed by Graeco-Roman thinkers. This contribution thus explores which kinds of prophecy, inside and outside the Scriptures, are dangerous and impious according to Philo, and why. Special focus is laid on: the conceptual categories of ‘truth’, ‘authority’, and ‘appropriate time’ – crucial and widespread notions in the debates on prophecy at the turn of the millennium – and on the complex relation between contingency and transcendence in Philo’s thought.

From the Socratics to Augustine, men used women’s voices in philosophical dialogues to speak as experts on the body, especially in three aspects: birth, the physical details of death, and erotic desire. These connections were inaugurated by Plato and Xenophon. However, a changing anthropology, and especially the belief that the body persisted after death, led certain Christian authors to increase the role given to female characters. When the body was revalued and brought into the centre of philosophical focus, women’s voices moved from reported speech into direct speech. Simultaneously, late ancient Christian authors reflected on the inherent connection between erotic desire and the genre of the dialogue itself, matching their subject to their form. Using female characters in their dialogues helped male authors come to know certain things that using male voices could not do as well, by thinking through specific topics ‘like a woman’; the female, with her culturally embodied nature, became a model of an ideal life which insisted on the persistence of the body, even in the afterlife.