The Platonist Appropriation of Stoic Epistemology

An investigation of Middle Platonist epistemology. The paper argues that Middle Platonists developed an interpretation of Plato's theory of Forms as an answer to the Hellenistic debates between Stoics and Skeptics. More precisely, the paper reconstructs how Middle Platonists appropriated some Stoic key-notions (most notably, ennoiai, that is notions) and adapted them in a completely different epistemological theory. It is however debatable that this strategy succeeded. As Plotinus was going to argue, they were rather introducing the problem of scepticism to into the noetic world of intelligible entities.