The history of Neoplatonism until the present day is much too diverse and complex to be done justice to in an introductory article such as this. In spite of the ubiquity of proponents of this developed form of Platonism in all historical periods of western philosophy since late antiquity, today Neoplatonism has acquired the reputation of being speculative and abstract to a fault. Modern philosophical commitments to empiricism, logical positivism, and the analysis of language have not helped much to arrive at a judicious evaluation of the movement, its strengths and its weaknesses, and the dramatic scientific discoveries of contemporary bottom-up materialism tend to deter students from even attempting to find their way into the world of Neoplatonism. Perhaps another reason that this kind of thinking strikes the general public as arcane and alien may be that the Abrahamic religions, even if they too posit a single divine principle as the source of all being, conceive of this principle as a person and maker. This vestige of pre-philosophical anthropomorphism bypasses the difficult questions that the last pagan thinkers so arduously struggled to answer when they sought to explain the existence of the diverse and complex physical world from a non-material principle that they assumed to be nothing but One.