Physis as Heimarmene: On some fundamental principles of the Neoplatonic philosophy of nature

The paper focusses on the relation between Nature and Fate in Proclus’ philosophy, drawing mainly on texts from De Providentia, but with excursions into the Platonic Theology and the Timaeus Commentary. The enquiry leads to three main conclusions: 1) In De Providentia, Fate means much the same as natural necessity; elsewhere, it emerges as Nature qualified by the divine; 2) Neoplatonic ‘natural’ order is not an independent order, separate from transcendent divine causes; rather, bodies and their qualities must be regarded as the corporeal appearance of divine causes. Accordingly, Proclus posits not two or more distinct orders, but only one order, capable of assuming different shapes, according to different ontic levels. In such a respect, Proclus’ De Providentia is deeply influenced by Peripatetic concepts, here made to fit a different philosophical framework; 3) The value of Neoplatonic physics should not be measured from its attempts to develop a coherent conception of reality—in this respect the Neoplatonists were successful—but rather from its capacity to provide rational explanations of natural phenomena in all their complexity and multiple aspects

Physics and Metaphysics

ABSTRACT IN ITALIANO: La fisica neoplatonica si concentra sullo studio della cause metafisiche dei fenomeni fisici. Le caratteristiche e i comportamenti dei corpi, di per se stessi privi di consistenza ontologica, sono infatti determinati dalle rispettive cause trascendenti. Di qui l'atteggiamento antiempirista dei neoplatonici, che preferiscono dedurre le caratteristiche del mondo fisico a partire dalle strutture del mondo intelligibili. ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Neoplatonic physics focusses on the metaphysical causes of the physical world. The characters of the bodies, in themselves lacking of ontological consistence, are in fact due to the characters of their transcendent causes. Hence the antiempirism of the Neoplatonists, who prefer to deduce the features of the physical world from the incorporeal structures of the intelligible world