This book treats both Christian and non-Christian texts from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, and suggests that dealing with disagreement helped philosophers define their own traditions while creating a conceptual common ground.

Ancient philosophy is known for its organisation into distinct schools. But those schools were not locked into static dogmatism. As recent scholarship has shown, lively debate persisted between and within traditions. Yet the interplay between tradition and disagreement remains underexplored. This volume asks, first, how philosophers talked about differences of opinion within and between traditions and, second, how such debates affected the traditions involved. It covers the period from the first century BCE, which witnessed a turn to authoritative texts in different philosophical movements, through the rise of Christianity, to the golden age of Neoplatonic commentaries in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.

By studying various philosophical and Christian traditions alongside and in interaction with each other, this volume reveals common philosophical strategies of identification and differentiation. Ancient authors construct their own traditions in their (polemical) engagements with dissenters and opponents. Yet this very process of dissociation helped establish a common conceptual ground between traditions. This volume will be an important resource for specialists in late ancient philosophy, early Christianity, and the history of ideas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Albert Joosse and Angela Ulacco — Introduction

Riccardo Chiaradonna — The Early Peripatetic Interpreters of Aristotle’s Categories and the Previous Philosophical Tradition

Franco Ferrari — È esistita un’eterodossia nel medioplatonismo?

Teun Tieleman — Galen on Disagreement: Sects, Philosophical Methods and Christians

Albert Joosse — Γνῶθι σαυτόν and the Platonic Tradition in Clement of Alexandria

Sébastien Morlet — L’accusation de mauvaise entente (παρακοή) dans la polémique entre païens et chrétiens à la fin de l’Antiquité

Robbert M. van den Berg — Plato’s Violent Readers: Pagan Neoplatonists against Christian Appropriations of Plato’s Timaeus

Helmut Seng — Mythenkritik und Kultpolemik bei Firmicus Maternus

Alexandra Michalewski — « L’âme est le lieu des formes » Une réponse à l’argument du troisième homme à travers la symphônia de Platon et d’Aristote dans le Commentaire à la Métaphysique d’Asclépius de Tralles

Mareike Hauer — The Use of Stoic References in Simplicius’ Discussion of Quality

Index

Bibliography