This chapter considers in detail two dialogues from the "Appendix Platonica": the short dialogue "On Virtue" and the "Sisyphus". Both build upon Plato’s "Meno", but with notable reformulations and, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, this play of allusions has been interpreted as a sign of forgery, even if confirming the Academic orig...
In Plato’s diegetic dialogues, as well as in dramatic works, you can find a distinctive feature, an autonomous part opening the work, which is usually called “a prologue”. This term is taken from an ancient Greek drama and means in literal translation “before the content”. In dramatic scenes, which precede the main narrative part of Plato’s dialogue...
Published in Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity
The letters of Isidore of Pelusium present a variety of anthropological issues derived from the Scriptures and from his philosophical readings. This article aims to reconstruct Isidore’s anthropology by examining the value of these two realms of knowledge in his letters. In particular, it focuses on Epistula 895, dedicated to the interpretation of ...
International audience
Published in Apeiron
In several dialogues Socrates criticizes negative comments made against a sophist or the sophists. I show that Socrates’ target really is the sophists’ detractor, not the sophists themselves. From these passages I draw two broader conclusions. First, Plato’s defence of Socrates’ memory sometimes relies on creating a parallel between sophists and So...
Published in Apeiron
I argue that Plato thinks that a sunaition is a mere tool used by a soul (or by the cosmic nous) to promote an intended outcome. In the first section, I develop the connection between sunaitia and Plato’s teleology. In the second section, I argue that sunaitia belong to Plato’s theory of the soul as a self-mover: specifically, they are those things...
Published in SAECULUM
The common ground of the monotheist religions is by no means separable from the philosophia perennis, a universal wisdom expressed by many theological and mystical traditions. The descent of the Soul in the world, common to monotheist religions and to spiritual traditions from the East, is also the origin of the European philosophical tradition of ...
Published in Elenchos
The aim of this paper is to provide a new reading of Plato’s precosmos (Ti. 52d2–53c3). More specifically, I shall argue that the precosmos is populated by bodies deriving from random complexes of properties, and that this is the effect of the Receptacle’s full precosmic participation in the Paradigm. This will turn out to be consistent with a robu...
Published in Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity
The presence of Plato and Platonic philosophy in the late antique Christian novel, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, has been underexamined. The present article takes a twofold approach: first, it discusses Platonic references and allusions in the disputes between Appion the grammarian and Clement, a follower of the apostle Peter (Homiliae Clementina...
Après l’âge d’or du platonisme dans la Renaissance française, le père de l’Académie tombe en disgrâce, et même quasiment dans l’oubli. Ce n’est que dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle — voire dans le dernier quart — qu’il refait surface, et d’une manière éclatante : Platon constitue alors un enjeu majeur dans la Querelle des Anciens et des Moder...
