Late Antique Epistemology explores the techniques used by late antique philosophers to discuss truth. Non-rational ways to discover truth, or to reform the soul, have usually been thought inferior to the philosophically approved techniques of rational argument, suitable for the less philosophically inclined, for children, savages or the uneducated. Religious rituals, oracles, erotic passion, madness may all have served to waken courage or remind us of realities obscured by everyday concerns. What is unusual in the late antique (...) classical philosophers is that these techniques were reckoned as reliable as reasoned argument, or better still. Late twentieth century commentators have offered psychological explanations of this turn, but only recently had it been accepted that there might also have been philosophical explanations, and that the later antique philosophers were not necessarily deluded. (shrink)

Late antiquity is increasingly recognised as a period of important cultural transformation. One of its crucial aspects is the emergence of a new awareness of human individuality. In this book, the authors assess the influence of seminal thinkers, including the Gnostics, Plotinus, and Augustine, but also of cultural and religious practices such as astrology and monasticism, as well as, more generally, the role played by intellectual disciplines such as grammar and Christian theology. The volume serves as a comprehensive (...) introduction to late antique understandings of human individuality. (shrink)

How on Earth can Humans be perfect? The striving for perfection has always occupied a central place in ancient Greek culture. This dynamics urged the Greeks on to surpass themselves in different fields, from sculpture and architecture over athletics to philosophy. In this volume, an international group of scholars examines how the ideal of perfection was conceived and pursued in Late Antiquity, both within philosophical circles and Christianity. Their studies yield a fascinating panorama of various attempts to bridge (...) the unbridgeable and assimilate our frail, imperfect human nature as far as possible to divine perfection. (shrink)

The late antique rabbis of Roman Palestine were seasoned jurists, experts on exegesis and legal interpretation. Yet rabbinic literature does not theorize. A positive account of rabbinic conceptions of language therefore remains a desideratum. I choose an alternative approach. Legal reasoning relies on language to ground the determinacy of the law. Jurists must thus confront language when it threatens to undermine the latter. Conversely, they may hold language to safeguard legal determinacy. Drawing on insights from legal theory, I turn (...) to an unusual rabbinic rule of inference. Its earliest attested version suggests a universal possibility of inference “from the category of yes that of no, from the category of no that of yes.” I show that the ever-evolving uses of this rule allow us to observe a shift in linguistic attitude, increasingly acknowledging linguistic uncertainty. My findings tie in with recent advances in the study of rabbinic exegesis. (shrink)

본 논문의 목적은 아리스토텔레스로부터 시작하여 초기 페리파토스학파를 거쳐 고대후기에 이르기까지 ‘아리스토텔레스 논리학’의 특정 요소가 발전해 가는 과정을 추적하는 것이다. 고대 후기에는 가언삼단논법으로 분류된 4개의 논증형식이 있었다. 긍정적 긍정식(modus ponendo ponens), 부정적 부정식(modus tollendo tollens), 긍정적 부정식(modus ponendo tollens), 부정적 긍정식(modus tollendo ponens)이 그것들이다. 우리가 다루게 될 문제는 다음과 같은 것들이다. 앞에서 제시되었던 4개의 논증형식은 정확하게 어떤 상황에서 생겨났는가? 이 4개의 논증형식이 왜 ‘가언’ 삼단논법이라고 명명되었는가? 어떤 근거에서 이 4개의 논증형식이 타당하게 되는가? 논의를 진행하는 가운데 우리는 이 4개의 논증형식이 『분석론 전서』와 (...) 『토피카』에 보존되어 있는 아리스토텔레스 논리학의 특정 요소들이 오랜 기간에 걸쳐 점진적으로 발전한 결과임을 논증할 것이다.BR 우리의 논의결과는 이렇다. 첫째, 고대 후기에 오늘날의 조건명제와 선언명제가 가언명제로 분류된 이유는 단순히 조건명제와 선언명제에 조건적 요소가 포함되어 있기 때문이었다. 둘째, 고대 후기에 4가지 유형의 가언삼단논법이 ‘가언’ 삼단논법이라고 명명된 이유는 이 4가지 유형의 논증에 귀결관계와 비정합성관계의 조합으로부터 획득되는 가언명제가 적어도 한 개는 포함되어 있기 때문이었다. 셋째, 고대 후기에 4가지 유형의 가언삼단논법이 타당한 것으로 간주된 이유는 그것들 모두가 ‘모두스 포넨스’(modus ponens)유형의 형식을 갖고 있기 때문이었다. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only (...) barrenness. The third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

Scholarship of the last half century has transformed approaches to paganism and Christianity in the late Roman world. Much as the paradigm of late antiquity has replaced traditional narratives of ‘decline and fall’, expounded systematically in the eighteenth century by Edward Gibbon, so recent scholarship has also challenged older narratives of pagan / Christian conflict, particularly heroic narratives of the resistance mounted by Rome’s ‘last pagans’. This article locates a crucial—although often neglected—prehistory and parallel to these debates (...) in the world of early modern humanist scholarship. It examines how fourth-century Roman pagan authors—especially Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and Ammianus Marcellinus—were read by printers, editors and philologists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a world before Gibbonian decline and fall, humanist scholars navigated both religious conflicts and literary canon wars to articulate a robust vision of late antiquity avant la lettre, although for reasons very different from those which have motivated twentieth- and twenty-first-century revisionists. Even as some of their colleagues dismissed late pagan texts on the grounds of deficient Latinity or deficient Christianity (or both), the early modern scholars who embraced this expansive vision of the ancient canon ended up highlighting the ambiguities of late antique religion—especially the grey area between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘Christian’. (shrink)

The stereotype of slave-run latifundia being turned into serf-worked estates is no longer credible as a model of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, but Chris Wickham’s anomalous characterisation of the Roman Empire as ‘feudal’ is scarcely a viable alternative to that. If a fully-articulated feudal economy only emerged in the later middle ages, what do we make of the preceding centuries? By postulating a ‘general dominance of tenant production’ throughout the period covered by his book, Wickham (...) fails to offer any basis for a closer characterisation of the post-Roman rural labour-force and exaggerates the degree of control that peasants enjoyed in the late Empire and post-Roman world. A substantial part of the rural labour-force of the sixth to eighth centuries comprised groups who, like Rosamond Faith’s inland-workers in Anglo-Saxon England, were more proletarian than peasant-like. The paper suggests the likely ways in which that situation reflected Roman traditions of direct management and the subordination of labour, and outlines what a Marxist theory of the so-called colonate might look like. After discussing Wickham’s handling of the colonate and slavery, and looking briefly at the nature of estates and the fate of the Roman aristocracy, I conclude by criticising the way Wickham uses the category of ‘mode of production’. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 13 Heft: 1 Seiten: 5-28.

Distinguished experts from a range of disciplines with a common interest in late antiquity probe the apparent paradox of pagan monotheism and reach a better understanding of the historical roots of Christianity.

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 13 Heft: 1 Seiten: 211-274.

Ancient biographies were more than accounts of the deeds of past heroes and guides for moral living. They were also arenas for debating pressing philosophical questions and establishing intellectual credentials, as Arthur P. Urbano argues in this study of biographies composed in Late Antiquity.

This first volume of the new Brill series "Ancient Philosophy & Religion" offers analyses of Platonic philosophy and piety, the emergence of a common religio-philosophical discourse in Antiquity, the place of Jesus among ancient philosophers, and responses of pagan philosophers to Christianity from the second century to Late Antiquity.

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each (...) period. Topics examined range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

Introduction: why the De anima commentaries? This book will concentrate on interpretations of the De anima in late antiquity, and what we can learn from ...

The present study, for the first time, provides a comparative analysis of the objections raised against Christianity by late antique pagan philosophers (esp. Celsus in Alethes logos, Porphyry in Contra Christianos, and Julian the Apostate in Contra Gali-laeos) and Enlightenment philosophers and freethinkers and examines the impact of pagan thinking on the critique of Christianity in the 16th to 18th centuries - in particular, on discussions concerning the authority of the Bible, biblical exegesis, the Christian concept of faith, religious (...) coercion and the uniformity of faith, the belief in miracles, and the Christ-ian understanding of morality. (shrink)

A description and analysis of attitudes to non-human animals in classical and late antique Mediterranean thought.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Network of Schools The Religious Climate Philosophy, Revelation, and Faith The Course in Philosophy: A Day in Proclus's Life Neoplatonic Pedagogical Thought The Doctrinal Fecundity of Exegetical Misinterpretations The “Symphonic” Presupposition: Syrianus, and the Harmony of Plato and Aristotle according to Simplicius The Explication of Texts: The Neoplatonic cursus of Study The Beginning of the Cursus: The Introductions Taught in the Framework of the Exegesis of Porphyry's Isagoge and Aristotle's Categories, and The General Principles (...) of Exegesis Questions Preliminary to the Study of Plato How Commentaries Were Composed Bibliography. (shrink)

An astounding project of analysis on more than one hundred translations of ancient philosophical texts, this index of words found in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series comprises some 114,000 entries. It forms in effect a unique dictionary of philosophical terms from the post-Hellenistic period through to late antiquity and will be an essential reference tool for any scholar working on the meaning of these ancient texts. As traditional dictionaries have usually neglected to include translation examples from philosophical (...) texts of this period, scholars interested in how meanings of words vary across time and author have been ill served. This index fills a huge gap, therefore, in the lexical analysis of ancient Greek and has application well beyond the reading of ancient philosophical commentaries. Bringing together the full indexes from 110 of the volumes published in Bloomsbury's Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, McKirahan has combined each word entry and analysed how many times particular translations occur. He presents his findings numerically so that each meaning in turn has a note as to the number of times it is used. For meanings that are found between one and four times the volume details are also given so that readers may quickly and easily look up the texts themselves. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity: Plotinus, who establishes many of the central themes for later debate and establishes strategies of argument and interpretation, and Proclus, who develops a grand philosophical synthesis and provides original insights into a number of important problems regarding being and thinking, matter and evil.

One of the most significant cultural achievements of Late Antiquity lies in the domains of philosophy and religion, more particularly in the establishment and development of Neoplatonism as one of the chief vehicles of thought and subsequent channel for the transmission of ancient philosophy to the medieval and renaissance worlds. Important, too, is the emergence of a distinctive Christian philosophy and theology based on a foundation of Greek pagan thought. This book provides an introduction to the main ideas (...) of Neoplatonism and some of the ways in which they influenced Christian thinkers. (shrink)

Readers of Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy will find a collection of authoritative papers from across the Neoplatonic and Eastern Christian traditions. It is only recently that scholars have started to take notice of the Eastern Christian engagement with late antique philosophical texts. This volume builds upon this new interest in order to show the dynamic nature of Neoplatonism and Eastern Christianity at a time when both faced a variety of challenges. The legacy of Greek philosophy in (...) the Christian East fills the gap between the schools of Alexandria and Baghdad and brings into focus the intellectual history of the period. The aim of the volume is to stimulate interest in late antique philosophy and its reception in the Christian East. (shrink)

Asia Minor witnessed a resurgence of construction and renovation activities in the Theodosian age, and in particular in the last twenty years of the 4th and the first twenty years of the 5th century AD. In fact, the typical Late Antique city, with its imposing fortification walls, heterogeneous street colonnades and agora porticoes, and monumental churches replacing earlier temples, came into being in these decades. A confrontation of the material remains with contemporaneous historical, political, social and religious events and (...) changes, would suggest that these urbanistic interventions were the result of unrelated factors arising in just a few decades’ time. Despite the absence of a deliberate Theodosian policy of urban renewal, the care for and energy invested in the cityscape does testify to continuance of aesthetic principles and representational concerns, not only at Constantinople, but also in the provincial capitals and even in the smaller cities of the region. (shrink)

The Quranic terms sarab, a hapax legomenon, and majmaʿ al-baḥrayn have generated a number of different interpretations among both Muslim exegetes and Western scholars. In this article I demonstrate how they can be better understood when read in the light of the cultural context of late antiquity and, in particular, of the cosmological imagery of this historical period.