ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop music as it was conceived by, and of particular interest to, philosophers in Late Antiquity, in particular the Neoplatonic philosophers of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. It explores the impact of music, as these philosophers conceived of it, on the way in which they approached other areas of inquiry. ‘Cosmic music’ is what must be supposed to arise from the mathematical structures and cycles of the heavenly bodies, of the seasons and of the elements constituting the world, whereas ‘human music’ has to do with the structures composing the human soul, the human body and the relation between soul and body. Music also includes rhythmics, metrics, what relates to instruments, to poetry and delivery. The differentiation of the object of music begins from a distinction, among beings in general and in the universe in particular, between the nature of the discrete and that of the continuous.
