Category Archives: Books

Books

Trascendenza e cambiamento in Filone di Alessandria. La chiave del paradosso

Bram Roosen

325 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2019
ISBN: 978-2-503-58425-6
EUR 80,00 excl. tax
Series: Monothéismes et Philosophie, vol. 25

La strutturazione della trascendenza del Principio primo, l’accostamento tra Dio ed Essere e la tensione con il divenire umano e cosmologico sono al centro di questo studio sul pensiero di Filone di Alessandria.

Il volume esplora il nesso tra immutabilit e cambiamento come chiave della relazione tra uomo e Dio nel pensiero di Filone di Alessandria, sullo sfondo del rapporto tra ermeneutica biblica e tradizione platonica. A partire dallidentit istituita tra Dio ed Essere (Ex. 3,14 – LXX), nei testi dell’autore si configura una differenza fondamentale tra il divino, essenzialmente estraneo al divenire, in virt di una trascendenza assoluta assegnata al Principio e propria del platonismo di et imperiale, e il cosmo e luomo, contrassegnati invece dalla condizione originata e mutevole, descritta come fonte di fatica e instabilit.

A partire da un’analisi terminologica e teoretica che articola piano ontologico e metafisico, mantenendo il filo ermeneutico della polarit tra trascendenza e mutamento, si indaga poi il percorso etico e noetico proposto all’uomo, tra conoscenza e assimilazione a un Dio Essere inconoscibile e differente. Emerge cos la cifra del paradosso: strumento decisivo nello stoicismo, esso viene mutuato e trasformato da Filone, fino a diventare la chiave interpretativa del movimento di rinuncia del saggio, verso una vera e propria etica della trascendenza.

Il tema e lautore analizzati si prestano a illuminare in modo singolare il tornante della filosofia nel primo secolo, nel dibattito tra scuole filosofiche e tradizioni religiose, secondo una lettura positiva delleclettismo. La questione del rapporto tra metafisica ed etica, al centro di questa ricerca, non solo consente di mettere in luce le scelte originali di Filone nellevoluzione del platonismo, ma genera anche delle risonanze che giungono fino a lambire il contemporaneo, sollevando la questione del rapporto tra trascendenza e cura di s, nella forma del divenire se stessi.

Francesca Simeoni ha conseguito il titolo di Dottore di Ricerca presso l’Università degli Studi di Padova con una tesi sulla filosofia di età imperiale. Prosegue ora i suoi studi presso l’Università LUMSA di Roma all’interno del Dottorato internazionale “Contemporary Humanism”. I suoi interessi di ricerca riguardano il rapporto tra metafisica e antropologia, in particolare in riferimento alle tradizioni platonica ed ebraico-cristiana.
Table of Contents

Préface de Carlos Levy: Philon et la théologie du paradoxe

Introduzione

Trascendenza e cura di sé?
Filone di Alessandria, un eclettismo ermeneutico
Ex. 3,14
Percorso dell’indagine
Metodo e limiti dell’indagine
Edizioni critiche di riferimento

Abbreviazioni delle opere Filoniane

Capitolo 1. Trascendenza e Immutabilità di Dio: L’Essere
I. Ex. 3,14 e l’identità di Dio come ὁ ὤν / το ὄν nel corpus filoniano
1. La questione di Ex. 3,14 e il testo della Septuaginta
2. Ex. 3,14 nel corpus filoniano
L’intreccio tra nome ed Essere
La differenza ontologica
II. Aspetti della trascendenza ontologica divina
Trascendenza e origine
III. Trascendenza come immutabilità
Cosmogenesi, metafisica, fede
L’immutabilità di Dio come nodo teoretico della differenza ontologica
IV. Metafisica e ontologia filoniane nel panorama filosofico di età imperiale

Capitolo 2. Trascendenza e Manifestazione di Dio: Le Potenze
I. La δύναμις divina
II. La doppia immagine di Dio
III. Il sistema aspettuale e relazionale delle Potenze
1. Esistenza e gloria
2. Parziale coessenzialità
3. Relazionalità paradossale
4. Presenza divina nel cosmo
5. Potenza di coesione cosmica e di governo
IV. Trascendenza nella manifestazione

Capitolo 3. Trascendenza e γένεσις: Il Cambiamento
I. Aspetti cosmologici del cambiamento
1. Teologia come racconto dell’origine
2. Γένεσις e cambiamento: l’alterità del mondo sensibile
3. Cambiamento e fatica: la debolezza del mondo sensibile
4. Divinità dell’artefatto: il mondo come intermediario
5. Γένεσις e ambivalenza del cosmo
II. Aspetti antropologici del cambiamento
1. L’uomo: un’identità esodale
2. Mutevolezza della condizione umana come instabilità
3. Fugacità, inconsistenza e incomprensibilità dell’esistenza
4. Instabilità dell’intelletto e del giudizio etico
5. Piacere e passioni come fattori di destabilizzazione

Capitolo 4. Trascendenza ed Esistenza Umana: Il Paradosso
I. Conoscere l’inconoscibile?
1. Pensare e somiglianza
2. Pensiero e trascendenza
3. Conoscere l’inconoscibilità
II. Assimilarsi al dissimile. Quale etica?
1. Il valore etico del cambiamento. La migrazione, la fuga, la scala
2. Mutare per divenire immutabili
3. Conosci il tuo nulla
III. Felicità e τέλος: realizzazione, rinuncia, grazia
La conversione dello scetticismo
IV. Il paradosso: chiave della relazione tra uomo e Dio

Conclusione
Ex. 3,14: genesi e differenza
Cambiamento e trascendenza
Il paradosso come relazione tra uomo e Dio

Bibliografia
Indice dei passi di Filone di Alessandria
Indice dei passi di autori antichi
Indice dei passi biblici
Indice dei nomi

Books

Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity

Rebecca LeMoine

Classical antiquity has become a political battleground in recent years in debates over immigration and cultural identity-whether it is ancient sculpture, symbolism, or even philosophy. Caught in the crossfire is the legacy of the famed ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Though works such as Plato’s Republic have long been considered essential reading for college students, protestors on campuses around the world are calling for the removal of Plato’s dialogues from the curriculum, contending that Plato and other thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition promote xenophobic and exclusionary ideologies. The appropriation of the classics by white nationalists throughout history-from the Nazis to modern-day hate groups-appears to lend credence to this claim, and the traditional scholarly narrative of cultural diversity in classical Greek political thought often reinforces the perception of ancient thinkers as xenophobic. This is particularly the case with interpretations of Plato. While scholars who study Plato reject the wholesale dismissal of his work, the vast majority tend to admit that his portrayal of foreigners is unsettling. From student protests over the teaching of canonical texts such as Plato’s Republic to the use of images of classical Greek statues in white supremacist propaganda, the world of the ancient Greeks is deeply implicated in a heated contemporary debate about identity and diversity.

Plato’s Caves defends the bold thesis that Plato was a friend of cultural diversity, contrary to many contemporary perceptions. It shows that, across Plato’s dialogues, foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: liberating citizens from intellectual bondage. Through close readings of four Platonic dialogues-Republic, Menexenus, Laws, and Phaedrus-Rebecca LeMoine recovers Plato’s unique insight into the promise, and risk, of cross-cultural engagement. Like the Socratic “gadfly” who stings the “horse” of Athens into wakefulness, foreigners can provoke citizens to self-reflection by exposing contradictions and confronting them with alternative ways of life. The painfulness of this experience explains why encounters with foreigners often give rise to tension and conflict. Yet it also reveals why cultural diversity is an essential good. Simply put, exposure to cultural diversity helps one develop the intellectual humility one needs to be a good citizen and global neighbor. By illuminating Plato’s epistemological argument for cultural diversity, Plato’s Caves challenges readers to examine themselves and to reinvigorate their love of learning.

Books

Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation

Adriel M. Trott

Situating her argument in the debates between Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler over efforts to resuscitate the meaning and role of matter in the history of philosophy, Trott argues for a robust sense of matter in Aristotle’s account of generation. Specifically, Trott argues that form in the figure of semen in Aristotle’s account of generation is dependent on material power to do its work. This argument shows how matter has its own power in Aristotle in such a way that makes the relationship of form to matter in Aristotle’s causal structure akin to that of a Möbius strip. The book establishes a positive contribution of material, which Aristotle associates with the female, while also showing the dependence of form, which Aristotle associates with the male, on the material power of elemental forces, specifically of heat.

Books

Plato’s Timaeus and the Missing Fourth Guest: Finding the Harmony of the Spheres

Donna Adler

Donna M. Altimari Adler, Ph.D., long time member of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, is pleased to announce that Brill Academic Publishers will be releasing her new book, Plato’s Timaeus and the Missing Fourth Guest: Finding the Harmony of the Spheres on December 24, 2019. This technical work in ancient philosophy solves a very old puzzle and will be most useful to scholars of ancient cosmology, the history of ideas, and the roots of western music theory.

Books

Sapiens and Sthitaprajna: A Comparative Study in Seneca’s Stoicism and the Bhagavadgita

Ashwini Mokashi

Sapiens and Sthitaprajna studies the concept of a wise person in the Stoic Seneca and in the Bhagavadgita. Although the Gita and Seneca’s writings were composed at least two centuries apart and a continent apart, they have much in common in recommending a well-lived life. This book describes how in both a wise person is endowed with both virtue and wisdom, is moral, makes right judgements and takes responsibility for actions. A wise and virtuous person always enjoys happiness, as happiness consists in knowing that one has done the right thing at the right time. Both Seneca and the Gita demand intellectual rigour and wisdom for leading a virtuous and effective life. They provide guidelines for how to become and be wise. Both systems demand a sage to be emotionally sound and devoid of passions. This leads to mental peace and balance, and ultimately tranquillity and happiness. While surveying these similarities, this study also finds differences in their ways of application of these ideas. The metaphysics of the Gita obliges the sage to practise meditation, while the Stoics require a sage to be a rational person committed to analysing and intellectualizing any situation. This comparative study will be of interest to students of both Ancient Western and Ancient Indian Philosophy. Practitioners of Stoicism and followers of the Gita should find the presence of closely-related ideas in a very different tradition of interest while perhaps finding somewhat different prescriptions a spur to action.

Books

Interconnectedness. The Living World of the Early Greek Philosophers

Claudia Zatta

What did the early Greek philosophers think about animals and their lives? How did they view plants? And, ultimately, what type of relationship did they envisage between all sorts of living beings? On these topics there is evidence of a prolonged investigation by several Presocratics. However, scholarship has paid little attention to these issues and to the surprisingly “modern” development they received in Presocratics’ doctrines. This book fills this lacuna through a detailed (and largely unprecedented) analysis of the extant evidence.

The volume includes also the first extensive collection of the ancient sources pertaining to living beings and life in early Greek philosophy, organized chronologically and thematically.

Books

Remaking Boethius. The English Language Translation Tradition of The Consolation of Philosophy

Bram Roosen

This volume is a reference work, organized chronologically in its sections, with a separate entry for each translator’s work. The sections are defined by the type of translations they comprise. The plan of the book is encyclopedic in nature: some biographical material is provided for each translator; the translations are described briefly, as are their linguistic peculiarities, their implied audiences, their links with other translations, and their general reception. Sample passages from the translations are provided, and where possible these samples are taken from two of the most well-known moments in the Consolatio: the appearance of Lady Philosophy, narrated by the Prisoner, and the cosmological hymn to the Deus of the work, sung by Lady Philosophy.

Where possible, an attempt also has been made to keep the general appearance of the original printed pages. Orthographic peculiarities (in spelling, capitalization, indentation, etc.) except for the elongated “s” have been maintained. Notes inserted by the translators or editors upon the passages transcribed in this volume are maintained as footnotes. These notes are included because they reveal much about the scholarship that the translators bring to their work of translating. The notes signal the translators’ familiarity with commentaries and earlier Consolatio translations, and they help to identify the types of audiences targeted by the translators (whether general or scholarly). The notes indicate points in the text (either grammatical or cultural) that translators or editors deemed needful of clarification for their readers, but the notes often also represent actual borrowings of notes, sometimes verbatim, from earlier translations. Such “borrowed notes” help to establish or verify lines of affiliation between the translations.

Books

Looking at Beauty: to Kalon in Western Greece

Heather L. Reid

The ancient Greek word kalon can be translated as beautiful, good, noble, or fine— yet somehow it transcends any one of those concepts. In art and literature, it can apply straightforwardly to figures like Helen or Aphrodite, or enigmatically to the pais kalos: the youthful athlete that decorates so much sympotic pottery. In the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, meanwhile, it takes on an ethical, even transcendent dimension. And yet, the thread between a beautiful painting and the Platonic form of the beautiful is never completely broken. In the summer of 2018, a group of scholars from varying disciplines gathered in Siracusa, Sicily – a place of not indifferent beauty itself – to discuss the nature of to kalon in ancient Greek culture. We were especially interested in the large part of that heritage that derives from or was influenced by Western Greece – the ancient Hellenic cities of Sicily and Southern Italy. The result is a volume that considers art, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in exploring the nature of beauty.

Books

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

Sara Beth Haring

In “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” Donald Robertson teaches the life-changing principles of Stoicism through the story of its most famous proponent, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Robertson, who is a cognitive psychotherapist, shows how Aurelius used philosophical doctrines and therapeutic practices to build emotional resilience and endure tremendous adversity. Whether you are new to Stoicism or a long-time student of it, this book will help readers succeed in applying the same methods to their own lives. It is an essential guide to helping people handle the ethical and psychological challenges we face today.

Books

When Wisdom Calls: Philosophical Protreptic in Antiquity

Bram Roosen

517 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2018, ISBN: 978-2-503-56855-3, € 100 excl. tax
Series: Monothéismes et Philosophie, vol. 24

Philosophy has never been an obvious life choice, especially in the absence of apparent practical usefulness. The intellectual effort and moral discipline it exacts appeared uninviting “from the outside.” However, the philosophical ideals of theoretical precision and living virtuously are what has shaped the cultural landscape of the West since Antiquity. This paradox arose because the ancients never confined their philosophy to the systematic exposition of doctrine. Orations, treatises, dialogues and letters aimed at persuading people to become lovers of wisdom, not metaphorically, but truly and passionately. Rhetorical feats, logical intricacies, or mystical experience served to recruit adherents, to promote and defend philosophy, to support adherents and guide them towards their goal. Protreptic (from the Greek, “to exhort,” “to convert”) was the literary form that served all these functions. Content and mode of expression varied considerably when targeting classical Greek aristocracy, Hellenistic schoolrooms or members of the early Church where the tradition of protreptic was soon appropriated. This volume seeks to illuminate both the diversity and the continuity of protreptic in the work of a wide range of authors, from Parmenides to Augustine. The persistence of the literary form bears witness to a continued fascination with the call of wisdom.

Table of contents
Protreptic: A Protean Genre — Olga Alieva
Classical and Hellenistic World
Protreptic and Poetry: Hesiod, Parmenides, Empedocles — Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui
Protreptic and Pythagorean Sayings: Iamblichus’s Protrepticus — Johan C. Thom
Protreptic and Epideixis: Corpus Platonicum — Yuri Shichalin, Olga Alieva
Protreptic and Apotreptic: Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus — Douglas Stanley Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson
Protreptic and Epistolography: Epicurus — Jan Erik Heßler
Protreptique et exégèse : l’exhortation chez Philon d’Alexandrie — G. Hertz
Protreptic and Philosophical Dialogue: Cicero — G. Tsouni
Imperial Rome
Protreptique et auto-exhortation : les Lettres à Lucilius de Sénèque — Jordi Pià Comella
Protreptic and Paraenesis: The Second Epistle of Clement — James Starr
Protreptique et apologétique : Justin Martyr — Sophie Van der Meeren
Protreptic and Medicine: Galen — Vincenzo Damiani
Protreptic and Satire: Lucian — Markus Hafner
Protreptic and Rhetoric: Clement of Alexandria — Marco Rizzi
Protreptic and Mystagogy: Augustine’s Early Works — Paul van Geest
Protreptic and Autobiography: Dio’s Thirteenth Oration, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho and Cyprian’s To Donatus — Annemaré Kotzé
Protreptic and Biography: The Case of Marinus’s Vita Procli — Constantin Ionuț Mihai
Protreptique et isagogique : Les vestibules de la philosophie — Sophie Van der Meeren