ABSTRACT
The brief survey of ancient embryology in the previous chapter was restricted to four key issues that occupied both physicians and philosophers in antiquity and that were particularly relevant to Plato’s handling of embryology in the Timaeus, which we then examined in order to discern as well as possible his own views on these issues. This examination revealed a significant degree of ambiguity in Plato’s embryology and in particular a couple of loose ends that would occupy later Platonists. As we saw, Plato offers no account of how the soul in the seed manages to form the embryo, and he gives no indication of whether or how the Forms are causally relevant to the account of biological human reproduction. In order to see how later Platonists were able to develop an embryology capable of tying up these loose ends, we shall now explore the metaphysical background of Neoplatonism. The aim of the first section is to show how fundamental metaphysical commitments shaped ancient embryological theories in terms of both their causal accounts of formation and their views on the respective contributions of the male and the female. Here the reader will find a brief overview of Neoplatonic metaphysics, and it will be argued that a particular embryological framework is already to be found in this metaphysical model. The second section will then be dedicated to showing how Neoplatonists developed Plato’s theory of Forms in a way that made it an invaluable asset to biological theory.
