Concezioni stoiche e idee platoniche

Aim of paper is to show how Middle Platonists adapted Stoic epistemology to Platonist metaphysics. More precisely the focus is on the key notion of ennoia (conception). Middle Platonists argue against the hypothesis of an empirical origin and claim that it is what remains of the pre-natal vision of the ideas. According to them it is only through metaphysics that a theory of knowledge can be adequately grounded. In the second part the paper investigates the limitis of such a claim. The problem concerns the possibility of a proper knowledge of the ideas: if the ennoiai are grounded on the ideas, but the ideas are not object of proper knowledge, the risk is that we do not have anymore a proper criterion and therefore are not anymore able to account for the process of knowledge.