You will recall that Plotinus set off from Egyptian Alexandria around the year 250 to learn more of Persia and India, but never made it. It is fitting that his descendants created a Synthesis of Indian/Greek/Persian thought in Sassand Persia in the 500s and 600s. This Neo-Platonism mixed with the Syrian Christian Neo-Platonism in Baghdad to spark off the Golden Age of the Baghdad Caliphate in the 800’s.

reprinted from http://bartholomew.stanford.edu/authors/alfarabitext.html#

Neoplatonist and Aristotelian philosophical roots: the tradition of Ammonius
Alfarabi’s philosophy is directly affiliated with the Greek Neoplatonist school of Ammonius [teacher of Plotinus] in late fifth-century Alexandria, which survived as a philosophical curriculum among Syriac-speaking Christian clerics and intellectuals in the centers of Eastern Christianity in the Near East. The school of Ammonius, though Neoplatonist in its acceptance of Plotinian emanationism, was essentially Aristotelian in its basic orientation, structure, and contents.

Neoplatonist: school of religious and mystical philosophy that formed sometime in the 3rd century AD. It was founded by Plotinus and was based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists.

emanationism: the belief that there is no sentient, self-aware supreme being and that creation proceeds from a First Principle down through various grades of being

By Alfarabi’s own account, the Nestorian Christians Yuhanna ibn-Haylan, his immediate teacher, together with Matta ibn-Yunus (d. 940), his older contemporary and colleague in Baghdad, were direct descendants in this tradition.  Matta apparently deserves the credit for reviving Aristotelian studies in Baghdad and establishing both a curriculum of school texts and a method for their study.  Apparently, this was a response to the eclecticism of al-Kindī (d. ca. 870), who had resuscitated philosophy in Baghdad in the first third of the ninth century.  Kindī established philosophy as a rational and supra-religious discipline and a method for research on theological, social, and scientific problems.