Yury Arzhanov – författare

No detailed description available for "Porphyry, ›On Principles and Matter‹".

No detailed description available for "Porphyry, ›On Principles and Matter‹".

In 2021, a previously unknown treatise by Porphyry of Tyre, which has been preserved in a Syriac translation, was made available to historians of philosophy: Porphyry, On Principles and Matter (De Gruyter, 2021). This text not only enlarges our knowledge of the legacy of the most prominent disciple of Plotinus but also serves as an important witness to Platonist discussions of first principles and of Plato’s concept of prime matter in the Timaeus. The aim of the present volume of collected studies is two-fold. On the one hand, it brings up an update to the state of the art of our knowledge of Porphyry’s philosophy and of his role in the transmission of the earlier philosophical materials, especially those of the Middle Platonic works. On the other hand, it focuses on the questions of the reception of Porphyry’s legacy, both by Greek and Latin Platonists (with special interest in Calcidius) and by Christian Oriental authors (with particular focus on the Syriac tradition). The primary audience of the book will be scholars and graduate students in ancient and late ancient Greek philosophy, Orientalists and scholars interested in the Christian reception of Greek philosophy, in the studies of the Christian Orient, as well as in Greek, Latin, and Syriac philology.

Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) is a major figure in the history of the Syriac reception of Aristotle’s logic. He studied philosophy and medicine in the late 5th century in Alexandria with the famous Ammonius Hermeiou, whose lectures formed the basis for Sergius’ main philosophical work, his extensive Commentary on the Categories. In this treatise, Sergius adapted for his Christian audience the Alexandrian educational model and exegesis of Aristotle logical writings and in this way influenced subsequent centuries of Aristotelian studies in Syriac. The commentary contains an extensive introductory part which deals with the traditional set of preliminaries (prolegomena), e.g., the general division of sciences, the scope of Aristotle’s logic in general and of his treatise Categories in particular, etc. Moreover, it includes excurses in natural philosophy and contains extensive quotations from Aristotle’s Physics. Thus, Sergius’ treatise not only introduced the tradition of exegesis of Aristotle to the Syriac world, but provided Syriac readers with a general introduction to philosophy and logic and thus paved the way for the transmission of Greek sciences and philosophy from Alexandria to Baghdad.

The seven Syriac texts published in this volume are school manuals on logic composed between the 6th and the 9th centuries AD, the time of the decline of the traditional Greek paideia and the rise of Christian education. They explicate and adapt for Christian schools the main terminology of Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge. The earliest witness among them is based primarily on Sergius of Reshaina’s commentary on the Categories and Proba’s commentary on the Isagoge, and it presents the subject matters of these treatises in the form of tree diagrams. The collections of tree diagrams and short excerpts from such commentaries served as sources for the new schoolbooks containing philosophical divisions. These schoolbooks in turn became sources for the later manuals on logic published here. Ultimately, these later manuals were more focused on theological polemics than they were on Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s original texts. They thereby grant us insight into the context in which Aristotle and Porphyry were studied within the Christian schools and into the evolving school tradition during the period of transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages.