Philosophy and Sciences in the Christian Orient - Böcker

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 Cause of the foundation of schools, which has been written around 600 by the East Syriac author Barhadbeshabba, is practically unique in intellectual history by explaining the anthropological phenomenon of schools. The author, who was himself a teacher at the famous School of Nisibis in Upper Mesopotamia, describes the history of divine and human schools until his own lifetime by renarrating important parts of biblical history as forms of teachings, paying attention to the Greek philosophical tradition and the teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism. He introduces his work by a sketch of his own philosophical convictions regarding our knowledge of God, the necessity of logic and the status of our soul. Due to its diverse contents, the work finds since a long time the interest not only of specalists of Eastern Christianity, but also of ancient historians, of historians of philosophy and of researchers in the field of religion, esp. Coranic and Zorostrian Studies. A new critical edition of this important text is been for a long time a desideratum, because the first editor Addai Scher could not use all extant manuscripts. For this reason, the text is re-edited here with introduction, translation and notes, using four extant manuscripts as well as the documentation of three, last one’s given by Addai Scher in its 1907 edition. The introduction describes the manuscripts and their relationship as well as the circumstances of the text’s composition. Thus, this new edition will be an indispensable tool for anybody working in the field of intellectual history of the Near East immediately before the rise of Islam.