ABSTRACT
The present study was launched with the bold claim that Neoplatonic philosophers succeeded in setting out an embryological theory that was revolutionary in the way that it allocated causal roles to the male and the female, yet this new movement was labeled a quiet revolution in large part because of how Neoplatonists refrained from stressing the novelty of their theory by comparing and contrasting their views to those of their most notable predecessors. This was seen to be connected to a number of puzzles that collectively amounted to wondering how it could be that the Neoplatonists of all people ended up with such a revolutionary take on embryological etiology, given both their record of disinterest in Aristotle’s biological treatises and more generally their reputation for being averse to the natural sciences that had been assigned to them in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship. One aim of the preceding chapters has simply been to demonstrate the extent of Neoplatonic interest in embryology by going through a significant amount of embryological material found in their surviving writings, and the closer examination of this material has also shown it possible to discern a core embryological theory that was shared by the major Neoplatonist thinkers of late antiquity and that includes as a hallmark feature this new understanding of the male and female contributions. Regarding the puzzles, our results would appear to confirm the suggestion offered in the Introduction, namely that both the scope and the contours of their embryological program were determined by higher-order concerns, such as showing that the sensible world is a fair image of the intelligible.
