Immagini di Bellezza. Questioni di metafisica neoplatonica

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show, through some essential Neoplatonic texts, how Aesthetics can also touch the educational field in the Late Antique context and how language, exegesis and philosophy are closely related. The philosophy of art and Plato’s and Aristotle’s aesthetic sense are based on the concept of mimesis, concept which the Neoplatonists gather in order to explain the necessity of a scholastic curriculum made of mimetical speeches, i.e. true language images of the intelligible. These speeches, read and studied according to an exact order, can help to confer the right importance to sensible beauty, only an instrument to reach intelligible beauty. Each speech is one of the way in which the Good reveals itself in the sensible world and appears as the most beautiful expression of art able to create an aesthetic and cognitive delight.