Greek Wisdom Research Articles

ردِ پای حکمتِ یونانی در اشعار عبدالواسع جبلی غرجستانی

Philosophy is the co-born of humankind and philosophizing is also a manifestation of human thinking. It must be said with certainty that no historical period has been without philosophy. There is no doubt that Western philosophy has reached us in written form from Greece and then to the whole world. At the beginning of Islam, many Greek ruling sources were translated by Islamic thinkers, and caused the emergence of various scholars in the field of Islamic philosophy and the spread of philosophical propositions among the Persian poets and writers. Abdul-Wase Jabali Gharjistani, is one of the poets of the 6th century of Hijri, while he was fully familiar with his contemporary sciences, he had a remarkable knowledge of Greek wisdom and reflected it in his poetry. In the present article, with the aim of showing the subtleties of the poet's philosophical vision, the writer is more interested in answering the question of whether it is possible to consider Jabali as a follower of Greek philosophical thought. Because as appearing from his poems, The Jabali's way of thinking in addition to Epicureanism is thinking of happiness; In general, it is similar to the ideas of Hellenism. In order to provide an answer to the above question according to the indicators and components of Greek philosophy, in an inductive way using a descriptive-analytical method, among all the poems of Divan Jabali, there are poems with a way of thinking Greek that is classified, adapted and analyzed. The result of the research shows that Jebeli's thought is in the components of the materials of existence; Epicurean philosophy or honoring the soul, seizing the opportunity, paying attention to worldly pleasures and the influence of the stars and the heavens on humans is consistent with the Greek philosophy

The Ambiguous Religiosity of Justin Martyr

Abstract The comparison that Justin Martyr makes between the Christianity to which he converted and the traditional cults of his time has two sides that make Justin’s religiosity essentially ambiguous. On the one hand, Justin critically attributes the concepts and practices of ancient religiosity to the influence of demons. On the other hand, he wants to justify the universality of the Logos in human history. For this reason, he recognizes, in an appreciative way, certain traces of truth and morality in Greek wisdom, which finds its fullness and fulfillment in Christ, Logos made flesh. In the light of this ambiguous religiosity, one can understand why Justin coins the phrase “Christians before Jesus” as a category for Socrates and others. The driving force behind this operation is certainly confessional and proselytising, but for contemporary dialogue it can stimulate a sincere and passionate exchange with the religious position of one’s interlocutors.

Urban Ecosophy for a Post-Colonial Ecohumanism of the City

Ecosophy traces its etymological roots to the ancient Greek wisdom (sophia) of the household (oïkos), and can be understood as a form of ethics to inhabit the earth. Reflecting on the current challenges of the city, like the relation to the nature, or the social and ethnic inequalities in the urban space and through the ecosophical gaze of Arne Næss and Felix Guattari allows us to address core issues of an urban ecosophy. Within Næss ecosophy of the “self-realization”, the paper is pointing the link with his ontology of the relation with Gandhi´s insight on non-violence and the importance of the “sense of place” with the understanding and identification to the local environment. Guattari´s ecosophy as the paper will show, leads also to the concepts of relation and of the “Tout-monde” from the post-colonial thinker, and friend of him, Edouard Glissant. Furthermore, Stiegler´s concept of neguanthropocene and considering cities as “complex exorganisms” echoes Guattari´s urban ecosophy with the emergence of the “data city” performing a new kind of colonialism with data in the urban space. Finally, the essay will demonstrate how the urban ecosophy, as a practical ecosophy, in correspondence with ecohumanism, is proposing a decentring of humanism by considering the ecology in the city. It makes then possible to reconcile a modernist philosophy of individual and collective emancipation and deployment of subjectivities in the city, the idea of universalism with a world citizenship, with an emerging philosophy of respect and ethic for the living.

جهود الكندي في التوفيق بين الفلسفة والإسلام

In this research, I tackled the Arab philosopher Alkindi, the pioneer of Islamic philosophy, who is one of Islamic scholars. I tackled the meaning of word philosophy in the first chapter; then I tackled the conception of philosophy in ancient Greeks including naturalists, Stoics and Atheists as well as I tackled the way that Greek wisdom (philosophy) extracted by Arabs; particularly translation method which was used in translating many books of logic, philosophy and others. The second chapter includes Alkindi’s life; his birth, education, ancestry, his work in translation and philosophy. 
 In the third chapter, I tackled the efforts that were done by Alkindi to harmonize between philosophy and Islam; in other words, between mentality and inspiration through his Islamic theories in which he based his own Islamic belief, his great Islamic culture and knowledge of ancients. He gave evidences and proofs to pursue his theories and ratify theories of disbelievers of Greek philosophers. I also mentioned his great and unique additions to science of philosophy, which paved the way for Islamic philosophers who appeared after his era.
 The research ended bya conclusion and recommendations

Subtle Insights Concerning Knowledge and Practice

Subtle Insights Concerning Knowledge and Practice

التداخل اللغوی فی المنطق عند فلاسفة الإسلام

(التداخل اللغوي في المنطق عند فلاسفة الإسلام) يتطرق هذا البحث إلى التداخل بين اللغة والمنطق في الفلسفة الإسلامية و بيان التوفيق بين حکمة اليونان وحکمة الإسلام في المنطق واللغة، فاستخدام قوانين اللسان مع الفلسفة له أثر في التوافق مع الفلسفة واللغة التي نزل بها القرآن الکريم، فضلا عن إبداع حکماء الإسلام في تأسيس منطق قائم على الحکمة ولغة العرب، وللفلاسفة اجتهاداتهم في توفيق اللغة مع المنطق، وهذا يدل على أن المسلمين لم يکونوا مقلدين للفلاسفة اليونانيين رغم وجود جذور لغوية في الفلسفة اليونانية، بل إنهم طوروا المنطق واستحدثوا ألفاظا تتوافق مع الازدهار الفلسفي والمنطقي عند فلاسفة الإسلام. ومنهجي في البحث وصفي وتحليلي، وقسمته إلى مبحثين وخاتمة: المبحث الأول: جاء باسم استهلال حول المنطق واللغة، وفيه: أولا: التعريف بالمنطق وأصوله ثانيا: علاقة المنطق باللغة واللغة بالمنطق ثالثا: مع فلاسفة اليونان.. أصول البحث اللغوي المبحث الثاني جاء باسم: مداخلات البحث اللغوي في منطق فلاسفة الإسلام. Abstract: In this research which is entitled Linguistic Interrelationship in Logic for Islamic philosophers، there searcher deals with linguistic interrelationship in inIslamic philosophy، attempting to show reconciliation between Greek and Islamic wisdom in language and logic. The use of rules of tongue in philosophy has animpact on reconciling philosophy to language that is used by Holy Qur'an. The other thing worth mentioning is creativity of Muslim wisemen in establishing that is based on wisdom and Arabs' language. Philosophers have their own ways in reconciling to language، matter which indicates that Muslims were by no means just imitators of Greek philosophers. Despite existence of language roots in Greek wisdom، Muslims developed and invented concepts and terms that got along with logical and philosophical prosperity for Muslim philosophers.The approach followed here in research is descriptive /analytical. The paper is divided into two sections and a conclusion. The first section that is entitled Introduction tophilosophy and logic consists of (first) a definition of and its origins; (second) relationship between and language and vice versa; and (third) origins of language research for Greek philosophers. The second section comes under thetitle: the interrelationships of linguistic research with of Islamic philosophy.

Hypothêkai: On Wisdom Sayings and Wisdom Poems

Scholars have long recognized that hypothêkai, or instructional wisdom sayings, served as building blocks for larger structures of Greek wisdom poetry. Yet the mechanism that gets from saying to poem has never been traced in detail. If the transition involves more than piling sayings on top of each other, what intervenes? Focusing on the archaic hexametrical tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the paper develops a repertory of variations and expansions by which the primary genre, the hypothêkê speech-act, is transformed into a secondary genre—the larger-scale wisdom constructions we find in various Homeric speeches and much if not all of the Works and Days. The paper first argues for a precise formal description of the hypothêkê saying in the archaic hexameter; it then develops a toolbox of variations on the saying's basic form. Finally, the toolbox is put to work in order to read a forty-verse excerpt of Hesiod's Almanac.

Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Greek Wisdom in 19th Century Arabic Translation

Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Greek Wisdom in 19th Century Arabic Translation

The Transmission of Babylonian and Indian Knowledge to Islamicate Civilization

While the reception, or appropriation, of Greek wisdom by Islamicate civilization has been studied intensively, the input of other cultures has received less attention. The paper argues, inter alia, that the Greek astronomy studied and developed in Islamicate civilization should properly be called Greco-Babylonian; and that there was a long-standing, two-way exchange with India in many fields, especially medicine and religious thought.

Water in ancient Greek daily life

Water as the most significant element of nature, is the key to understand life development of every living creature. A glance at ancient Greeks and their civilisation would point out the role and use of water back then, so as to take advantage of ancient Greek wisdom in order to use water today with care and most respect to its deposits. The use they had of water, the devices they invented to ease their daily life, or the quotes they used in the flow of speech, signify how important water was for their existence.

Solon and the Greek Wisdom Tradition

Solon and the Greek Wisdom Tradition

Comparatism in the Neoplatonic Pantheon of Late Antiquity: Damascius, De Princ. III 159.6–167.25

In the following paper, we will look at the Neoplatonic pantheon as found in Damascius and at his comparatist method, which is centered on the principle ofsumphōnia. This hermeneutical tool is used to reconcile or harmonize the doctrines of Plato sand Aristotle with other Greek and foreign theological traditions. We will see this at play in a passage from the last part of Damascius’ treatise onProblems and Solutions Concerning First Principles(III 159.6–167.25). In this section, Damascius, the last diadoch of the Platonic school of Athens, is trying to show that his ‘Platonic’ theology is in accordance not only with Greek wisdom (as represented by theChaldean Oracles, Orphism, Homer, Hesiod and Pythagoreanism), but also with the oldest traditions of inspired religion, such as the Babylonian, Persian, Sidonian, Phoenician and Egyptian traditions. We will try to show that Damascius is establishing here a one-to-one correspondence between these Oriental and Hellenic theologies.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF HAPPINESS AND ETHICS: FROM ARISTOTLE TO DUNS SCOTUS AND E. LÉVINAS / LAIMĖS IR ETIKOS FENOMENOLOGIJA: NUO ARISTOTELIO IKI DUNSO ŠKOTO IR E. LÉVINO

In this paper I focus on the most problematic aspects of Aristotelian notion of happiness and ethics. Aristotelian ethics and the Greek wisdom on the whole strove for being, completeness and totality. Such thinking and its total attempt to achieve being, especialy rational being, that often became ideological violence, nowadays is receiving more and more incredulity and criticism. The schoolman of the 13th century Duns Scotus already stated such notions of happiness and ethics that required otherness with its radical transcendence. Also the phenomenologist of the 20th century Emmanuel Lévinas criticizes the Western view of humanity. The total(itarian) consciousness and any systematization in Lévinas’ alternative thinking are ruptured by the ideas of infinity and the other that enable to think otherwise, and outside of being. Santrauka Šiame straipsnyje, atsispiriant nuo Aristotelio laimės sąvokos, siekiama kritiškai apmąstyti klasikinę graikiškąją etikos sampratą. Aristotelio etika, o ir graikiškojoje ontologijoje įsišaknijusi (iš)mintis visada siekė apimti, išbaigti ir imanentiškai suvokti būties visumą. Toks vyraujančia tradicija tapęs mąstymas, pagrįstas conatus essendi ir dažnai neišvengiantis tapti ideologine prievarta, šiandien sulaukia vis daugiau nepasitikėjimo ir kritikos. Ir ne tik šiandien. Jau XIII a. scholastas Dunsas Škotas mąstė apie minėtos laimės ir etikos sampratos alternatyvą, kuri reikalauja kitybės idėjos, nurodančios į tai, kas absoliučiai transcenduoja mąstantįjį subjektą. Taip pat ir XX a. fenomenologas Emmanuelis Lévinas savo kritiką nukreipia į vakarietiškąją ontocentrinę pasaulėvoką ir iš jos išplaukiančią žmogiškumo sampratą. Totalią, sisteminančią ir neišvengiamai totalitarinę sąmonę Lévino alternatyviojoje fenomenologijoje „praplėšia“ begalybės ir kitybės idėjos, padedančios mąstyti kitaip ir anapus buvimo.

The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (review)

Reviewed by: The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Mehmet Karabela The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. By Rémi Brague. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 287. Hardcover $35.00. The majority of The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has been published previously in different forms, but this edition has been completely revised by the author, the well-known French [End Page 605] medievalist and intellectual historian Rémi Brague. It was first published in French under the title Au moyen du Moyen Âge in 2006. The book consists of sixteen essays ranging from Brague's early years at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I) in the 1990s up until 2005. As a collection of articles, therefore, The Legend of the Middle Ages is not designed to be a monograph; one should not expect a single argument from the book, although it does explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy that I will touch upon later. The Legend of the Middle Ages opens with an interview that clearly establishes the character of the author. In this section, Brague makes a distinction between institutionalized philosofia and private falsafa in Islamic countries, where philosophy remains a matter for small numbers of individuals. According to Brague, the tensions between philosophy and religion were not negotiated in the same way in the Muslim world as they were within Christianity: even though Jewish and Muslim philosophers achieved something like the Christian Scholastics, they were often isolated, and their influence was largely concentrated on the margins of society rather than in the center. On the other hand, philosophy became a university course of studies in medieval Europe, and more importantly, in practical terms, it became a breadwinning career (pp. 1-2). Within this context, the reader encounters a type of Christian exceptionalism while enjoying Brague's style of witticism and seriousness (not only in the interview section but across the whole book). For example, one of his arguments is that "philosophic activity, in the Middle Ages, was institutionalized only within Christianity [whereas] in Islamic lands and in the Jewish communities, it remained a hobby, a passion indulged in apart from one's true occupation" (p. 228). Averroes is cited as a core example; it is pointed out that his true occupation was "religious law," not philosophy, a fact that Brague establishes quoting Warren Z. Harvey: "Socrates was judged; Averroes and Maimonides were judges" (p. 49). These differences in the Christian and Islamic philosophical worlds, Brague explains, were due to different models of revelation that produced dissimilar interpretations of ancient Greek sources. Previously, Leo Strauss had spent a great deal of effort demonstrating the antagonistic relationship between Greek philosophy (reason) and the Biblical understanding of the world (revelation) in order to understand the transformation of Western civilization. For Strauss, this tension between reason (represented by Athens) and revelation (represented by Jerusalem) was a rich source for the vitality of the West. Within this broader context, Brague, in his Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (St. Augustine's Press, 2002), has expanded the Straussian dialectic of revelation and reason by emphasizing that Greek wisdom was always in the service of Qur'anic revelation and never accommodated the autonomy of the philosophical enterprise. Instead it was "a kind of Greek wisdom in an Islamic mantle," or a sort of theologically approved philosophy. However, in the first part of The Legend of the Middle Ages, Brague concludes (as opposed to his method in earlier works) by submitting an antithesis to the use of the term "Islamic philosophy." For him, this term can only be used with the condition that "we understand 'Islamic' to denote a civilization, rather than a religion" (p. 70). This brings two elements to mind: (1) religious-flavored Islamic philosophy, and (2) [End Page 606] philosophy in Islamic civilization (referring to any philosopher, both Muslim and non-Muslim, under Islamic rule). In the second part of the book, Brague narrows his focus to common themes and considers three topics in medieval philosophical...

Plato and the Talmud (review)

Reviewed by: Plato and the Talmud David Janssens Plato and the Talmud, by Jacob Howland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 282 pp. $68.00. The most important word in this book's title is in (or near) the middle. Indeed, many would argue that it should be "or" instead of "and," since there is an unbridgeable gulf between the theoretical life of free inquiry as exemplified by Plato's Socrates and the practical life of faithful obedience to divine authority as embodied by the Talmudic rabbis. Indeed, the notion of a fundamental incompatibility and even animosity between "Athens" and "Jerusalem" appears to find support in both traditions. Thus, the second-century philosopher Celsus rejects the tenets of both Judaism and Christianity as obscure fables, while asserting that "things are stated much better among the Greeks" (quoted in Origen, Against Celsus, VI.1). Conversely, according to the Babylonian Talmud's famous assertion, "Cursed be the individual who raises pigs, and cursed be the father who teaches his son Greek wisdom" (Tractate Sotah, 49a, quoted [End Page 152] on p. 8). Finally, even the apostle Paul points out the difference, albeit only to stress Christianity's own distinctiveness vis-à-vis the two opponents: "For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). While the author of the book acknowledges the relative truth of this view, he makes a compelling and well-documented case for not resting satisfied with it. Generally speaking, his approach consists in calling into question the differences and exploring the affinities between the putative contenders. Thus, he argues that the religious faith of the Talmudic rabbis, far from precluding rational enquiry, actually requires and fosters it. And similarly, Socratic dialectic proves to be based on a specific piety that includes an acute awareness of the limits of human reason. In both cases, the critical application of the intellect to the relationship between the human and the divine is an indispensable ingredient to living the good life: "Plato and the rabbis, I maintain, regard thinking that is in the broadest sense theological—that reflects on our relationship to God or the gods, and to human beings in the light of this relationship—as an activity no less sacred than traditional rituals of prayer and sacrifice" (p. 19). And in both cases, what is at stake is promoting an ethos, a way of life that is exemplary, both theoretically and practically. In fact, the clear-cut distinction between the theoretical and the practical dissolves. As the book argues, Plato and the Talmud teach by example: they not only depict distinctive and exemplary figures—Socrates and the prophets—in action, but they also deploy a number of literary devices designed to puzzle and provoke their readers to carefully examine the text, as well as their own lives, in light of the examples. To make this point, the author, who is equally at home in the labyrinth of the Platonic dialogues and in the intricacies of the Gemara, develops a careful and fascinating comparative interpretation of Plato's Apology and Euthyphro and the stories of Honi HaMe'aggel and Elazar in Ta'anit 3. From the latter, it appears that the Talmud accords an important role to prophetic outsiders whose greater intimacy with the divine puts them at odds with the community as well as with the emerging rabbinical tradition. However, this intimacy also enables them both to test, challenge, and criticize divine power and authority and to save the community in times of emergency. In his reading of Plato, on the other hand, the author ably argues that Socrates's philosophizing cannot be properly understood without taking seriously his claim that it is a specific form of piety. His attempt to refute the Delphic oracle's famous assertion springs from a fundamental trust in the veracity of the god: "In brief, Socrates makes it clear that the Delphic oracle arouses, authorizes, and focuses his desire for wisdom, and that it is able to do so only because he [End Page 153] is prepared from the outset to acknowledge...

Understanding Wisdom Literature: Conflict and Dissonance in the Hebrew Text (review)

Reviewed by: Understanding Wisdom Literature: Conflict and Dissonance in the Hebrew Text Matthew Goff Understanding Wisdom Literature: Conflict and Dissonance in the Hebrew Text. By David Penchansky. Pp. xii + 129. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012. Paper, $20.00. David Penchansky provides in this book his understanding of several wisdom texts—Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth, Ben Sira, and the Wisdom of Solomon. He is not afraid to offer opinions that run against the grain of conventional views in the field. At times his readings are quite astute and worth pondering, such as the thesis that Job 42:7 is important for understanding the book as a whole (p. 45). In other instances, his opinions are idiosyncratic and unpersuasive. For example, his division of Proverbs into distinctive and opposed categories, "Fear Yahweh" and "Get Wisdom," is not helpful because the book as a whole encourages one to both fear God and acquire wisdom, and the two themes go together, as Prov 1:7 asserts (p. 23). The author also offers his understanding of wisdom literature as a whole. He emphasizes, as the title of the book indicates, the "conflict and dissonance" of the views expressed on a variety of subjects in these texts (p. 7). Proverbs asserts that one should trust God, for example, whereas Job implies that the deity may not deserve such treatment. Penchansky's goal is not to solve such conflicts. Rather he is devoted to "exploring and elucidating the contours of the fault lines in the material" (p. 8). This approach allows one not only to appreciate the diversity in the material but also discern major points of theological difference within the sapiential tradition, about which, presumably, sages in ancient Israel disagreed and debated with one another. More problematically, the author stresses at the outset a distinction between "Hebrew wisdom," referring to Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes and "Greek wisdom," signifying Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon (p. 1). Penchansky grants that the dichotomy is not fully accurate since Ben Sira was originally written in Hebrew. Nevertheless, this bifurcation is operative for the book as a whole. The distinction conveys that the "Greek" books were written in the context of Hellenization and the "Hebrew" ones (which are also available in Greek in the Septuagint) were authored before this. For Penchansky, wisdom literature faced a sort of existential crisis during the Hellenistic period. The imposition of Greek culture on Jewish authors "so traumatized" the sages that the sapiential tradition was transformed and, in the opinion of the author, not for the better (p. 111). The tradition became, he asserts, more close-minded and bereft of the ambiguity and richness found in earlier texts like Job and Qoheleth. The identification of wisdom with the Torah in Ben Sira is used to "close [his students] off from other possibilities or dangerous questioning" (p. 94). The Wisdom of Solomon expresses "hostility towards Greek domination" and, by teaching that the [End Page 386] righteous will attain a blessed afterlife, discourages readers from probing the painful elements of life, as one finds in Job (p. 108). Lamenting the changes in the wisdom tradition, the author remarks when concluding his chapter on the Wisdom of Solomon, the last of the texts under scrutiny to be composed, that "we end this book in a sad place" (p. 108). Indeed it does. Penchansky's narrow framework for Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon does not do justice to these rich texts. First, he treats Hellenism as a monolithic, and negatively valued entity, and it is assumed that both texts were affected by the same imposition of Greek culture. But Ben Sira, written in Palestine in the second century B.C.E., was exposed to much less Hellenization than the Wisdom of Solomon, written (most likely) in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first century C.E. Also, while Penchansky is quite right that forms of ethnic nationalism are present in both compositions, his approach leaves little room to appreciate the rich tensions (or, one might say, conflict and dissonance) in them between universalism and particularism. While Ben Sira's association of wisdom with the Jewish Torah, a document for him not readily available to Gentiles, can be understood as...

Un laboratoire d’hébreu biblique à Alexandrie ?

The Maccabean crisis was a major bundle of events. Before it, the Gerizim Samaritans and the Jews were in good relationship, but a small faction of Babylonian reformers, symbolized by the characters of Ezra and Nehemiah, emerged as a strong party with Judas Maccabee, and the Hasmoneans after him. The Samaritans severed the ties, and later tried to abolish the Jerusalem temple. The book of Ben Sira was written in Hebrew in Egypt by an exile who dreamt of the restoration of the previous high priesthood. Wary of the Samaritans, he tried to promote a Jewish Hebrew library, with the Prophets and many Writings who were in stand-by at Alexandria and received there a final touch in a Greek environment. Some time earlier, before the crisis, the Pentateuch of all the Israelites was extant, but ancient writers held that Plato had borrowed from Moses and produced significant parallelism. The best hypothesis is to reverse the connection: the Alexandria library - and not Babylon - appears as a perfect place where Hebrew traditions of old could have been edited under the influence of Greek wisdom, in order to build up a historical monotheism.

Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi Dee L. Clayman . Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into Poetry. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte, 98. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009. Pp. x, 261. $154.00. ISBN 978-3-11-022080-3. The aim of the book as stated in the introduction is to reconstruct the work of Timon of Phlius to the extent possible and to assess its importance in the literature of the early Hellenistic period (2). The latter is a twofold attempt: first at tracing Timon's influence in some of the work of the great Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius of Rhodes; and secondly at establishing the presence of a Skeptic worldview in the avant-garde culture of the third century (the aesthetics of Skepticism). In this [End Page 521] reviewer's opinion the book succeeds admirably in creating a coherent picture of Timon, his world, and his place in the Greek literary tradition, but less so regarding an aesthetics of Skepticism and its presence in Hellenistic poetry. In competently locating Timon's Silloi in the context of Greek literature and philosophy, Clayman advances A. A. Long's seminal paper "Timon of Phlius. Pyrrhonist and satirist, PCPhS 24 (1978) 68-91, which laid the groundwork for such an approach (since it is the only other work in English to treat the Silloi as literature), and she paves the way for future work of the sort with texts of philosophers-poets/philosophical poetry. Chapter 1 begins with the biographical tradition, whose principal source is Diogenes Laertius. Clayman points out that biographical material, even when it is not necessarily reliable historical information on the author, has a certain value as it is drawn from older sources that depend, in turn, on the literary tradition (3). This orientation is present in most research on ancient biography, but Clayman adopts it for a series of valuable and nuanced re-interpretations of the biographical anecdotes. Thus the vignette preserved in Athenaeus 10.438a on the drinking match between Timon and the Academic Lacydes, with its use of Homeric quotations, is nicely traced not to Timon's personal habits nor used as an element for establishing the chronology of the poet, but is connected to the spirit of his Silloi, where intentional Homeric misquotation is used for comic effect. Chapter 2 analyzes Timon's Pytho and the Indalmoi by showing how Timon uses earlier philosophical imagery to establish Pyrrho as a unique figure in the Greek wisdom tradition and to claim for himself, and for Pyrrho, some of the prestige and aura of a recognized Greek philosophical tradition. In making these valuable connections, Clayman also finds convincing cases where Timon's Pyrrho seems inspired by Plato's similar depiction of Socrates (Apol. 22a, p. 51) or Plato's Good (Rep. 508e1-509a5). Less convincing in this reviewer's opinion is the attempt at individuating possible literary precedents for the Indalmoi in the chreiai or in Antimachus' Lyde (pp. 72-74). Rather than to opt with Clayman for a connection with the Lyde or with the chreiai, a prose genre, it might be appealing to link the Indalmoi with the Callimachean Aitia's series of question and answer for didactic purposes, or with the tradition of philosophical poetry which starts with the archaic philosophers and for which from classical times we have a series of names, such as Scythinus Teius, Plato's contemporary, who put Heraclitus' dogma into verse. Chapters 3 and 4 show how Timon seems to be acquainted both with biographical details or gossip about the philosophers as well as their written words. While there may be objections in the interpretation of specific fragments, Clayman gives the text of the Silloi its full literary weight. She also very successfully demonstrates how Timon's parody is less like that of his predecessors and more like modern parody (122). The book thus supplements the recent scholarly contributions by S. D. Olson and A. Sens on fourth-century parody and furthers our understanding of the genre of ancient parody. Chapters 5 and 6 intend to show that poets (e.g., Callimachus and Theocritus) were aware of and responded to not...

Once again on the meaning of philosophy

Traditional Western philosophy as upholding of the Greek wisdom at the same time is also a striving to being, totality, and completeness. Such thinking and its total attempt to be, that often becomes violence, nowadays is receiving more and more incredulity and criticism. The phenomenological thinker of Jewish descent E. Levinas radically resists totality as a continuous attempt at a universal synthesis in a whole history of philosophy. The Greek thinking always attempted to reduce any experience, everything, that has significance, into a complete system, and without leaving anything outside itself to become an absolute thinking. Levinas looks for an alternative. The concept of totality and any systematization in his alternative thinking are ruptured by the concept of Infinity that enables us to think otherwise and outside of being. Before looking at the world from the perspective of being it is necessary to question the being itself by starting from the other than being. The other than being, or the Good, is prior to being and gives it significance.

The Uses of Classical History for Contemporary Themes

OVER THE PAST DECADE, the state ofthefield ofclassical history—particularly its relevance in the curricula wars—has beena matterofintense debate, spilling occasionally outsidetheacademy injeremiads likeWho Killed Homer? DemiseofClassical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. authors oftwo recentlypublishedbooks, RichardNedLebowandJ. Peter Euben, make the case that intense engagement with ancient Greek thought continues topay dividends, particularly as we assess contemporarypolitical thoughtandpublicpolicy. Lebow and Euben anchor ourforum on The Uses ofClassical Historyfor Contemporary Themes with essays drawn, respec