Alexandrian School those Neoplatonic philosophers contemporary with and subsequent to Proclus (A.D. 412–85) who settled in Alexandria and taught there. They include Hermeias (fl. c.440), Proclus’s fellow-student of Syrianus; Hermeias’s son Ammonius (either 435–517 or 445– 526); and Ammonius’s three pupils, John Philoponus (c.490–575), Simplicius (writing after 532), and Asclepius (mid-sixth century). Later Alexandrians include Olympiodorus (495/505– after 565) and the Christians Elias (fl. c.540) and David (late sixth century). All these worked exclusively or primarily on the exegesis of Aristotle. Damascius (c.456–540) also took lectures from Ammonius at some time between 475 and 485, but in his doctrine he belongs much more to the Athenian tradition. Simplicius, on the other hand, while he moved to Athens to teach, remains more in the Alexandrian tradition.
Ever since Karl Praechter, who was influenced by a Hegelian view of historical development, the Alexandrian Platonists have been seen as professing a simpler form of metaphysics than the Athenian School, and deliberately avoiding controversy with the powerful Christian establishment in Alexandria by confining themselves largely to logic, mathematics, and the exegesis of Aristotle. There is a certain manifest truth in this picture, but modern scholarship (in particular Ilsetraut Hadot) has done much to show that even in Ammonius’s commentaries on Aristotle there lurks distinctive Neoplatonic doctrine, so that the contrast with the Athenian School has become somewhat blurred. The School may be said to have come to an end with the departure of Stephanus to take up the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about 610. See also NEOPLATONISM. J.M.D.