The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

The constituent elements of the book: Hermetic spirituality, the historical imagination, alterations of consciousness, the relation between language and experiential knowledge, and radical agnosticism in the study of religion. Narrative historiography and historical-comparative methods.

The somewhat neglected Wisdom of Solomon, or ‘Book of Wisdom’, contains concepts important not only for understanding wisdom in the rest of the OT but also for understanding how wisdom bridged both testaments. Joachim Schaper gives priority to the book’s theology and its place in Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian thought. He provides an overview of the book’s structure and versions, its intellectual context, its universalistic conceptions of God and humans in history, and how the book exhibits a ‘spiritual exercise’. Most important here are Wisdom’s use of πνευμα (‘spirit’) and its amalgam of Platonic, Stoic and Egyptian elements. It offers a distinct interpretation of the exodus, with which Schaper accounts for ideas of liberation and eschatology. As for the book as spiritual exercise, the discussion turns to matters of genre and literary function, disclosing its purpose to fortify religious beliefs and one’s self-mastery.

The chapter discusses two texts designed to throw into sharp relief Galen’s methods of solving natural and dialectical problems. The first comes from the treatise The Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs (SMT), and deals with the power and nature of olive oil. Galen castigates one Archidamus for having arrived at a mistaken account of oil’s nature, because he has generalised from a limited set of observations of questionable relevance. In contrast, Galen proposes an orderly course of inquiry, which starts from the complete account of the oil’s observable attributes and proceeds towards causal investigation by means of their empirically testable ‘differentiations’. The second text is Thrasybulus, subtitled Whether Hygiene Belongs to Medicine or Gymnastics (Thras.), and the chater shows how Galen sets about answering that question in a quasi-dialectical manner. The first step is the discovery of an agreed starting-point, consisting of a relevant and non-question-begging description of the point at issue. This is followed by further conceptual clarification of the agreed description, which, as the chapter argues, plays a similar role in the dialectical dispute as ‘differentiation’ of observed attributes in the former case.

Plato’s philosophical writings have over the centuries evoked widely differing styles of response. Platonist metaphysical systems have been created, as by his first successors in the Academy, down to Plotinus and later Neoplatonists and beyond; while the questioning spirit they evince was what fuelled the scepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades in the Hellenistic period, and what most impressed James Mill and George Grote, the nineteenth-century British ‘Philosophical Radicals’. Both types of response agreed, however, in rejecting what the dialogues call ‘opinion’, the metaphysicians because it lacks the security and clarity of true knowledge, the sceptics and radicals because it leaves prevailing norms unquestioned. They all took from Plato the precept: Think for yourself, whatever opinion or the prevailing norms may be. And from the beginning they disagreed among themselves too, with Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and his successor as head of the Academy, already rejecting the dialogues’ theory of transcendent Forms. Where the theory was embraced, it was developed further than its originator ever did himself or perhaps could have done. Plato wrote for eternity, to open minds and encourage independent thought in any reader, whatever their historical circumstances.

This chapter situates both the nominalist and neo-Carnapian approaches to mathematics introduced in Chapter 10 with particular reference to Logicism and Structuralism.

This chapter discusses challenges to the broadly neo-Carnapian philosophy of language invoked above concerning how to state it without paradox and evaluating metasemantic answers to access worries.

This chapter advocates and defends a broadly neo-Carnapian approach to the philosophy of mathematics more broadly.This approach combines potentialist set theory with platonism about non-set theoretic mathematical objects.

Chapter 2 concerns Holwell’s religiously heterodox interpretation of Hinduism, which is at the core of the book’s thesis, since his account would establish the ideas that would also run thematically throughout the works of Dow, Halhed and Wilkins. It outlines how Holwell’s interpretation of ‘the religion of the Gentoos’ was shaped by his preoccupation with heterodox religious arguments, as well as some genuine insight into Indian philosophical concepts. Despite its idiosyncratic origins, Holwell’s work captured some important tropes in deistic approaches to comparative religion, such as a narrative of original religion corrupted by priestcraft, which would come to dominate British constructions of India’s original ancient religion throughout the century.

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the recognised orientalist William Jones in the longer history of British interpretations of Hinduism sketched out in this book. It argues that his work represents a significant turning point in the formulation and reception of British accounts of Indian philosophical religion. In the first instance his religious outlook, which it identifies as closest to the Rational Dissent of late eighteenth-century Unitarianism, preferred an account of Indian religion that posited it as mystical and sublime, and therefore more malleable to Biblical scripture. This, in turn, made it particularly attractive to those seeking to redefine Britain’s relationship with India in the wake of war with Revolutionary France as one paternalist guardianship of ancient customs and traditions. At the turn of the century, British interpretations of Indian religion were thus to be stripped of any heterodox implications, and aligned with the institutionalisation of orientalist knowledge, as a branch of imperial governance.

This chapter aims to examine how Augustine appropriated Cicero’s philosophical thought. The first section studies the role of the Ciceronian protreptic Hortensius – the eudaimonism and the post-mortem destiny of the soul – in Augustine's philosophical project. The second analyzes the imprint of the philosophical dialogues of Cicero on Augustine’s early “Dialogues of Cassiciacum” (Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, 386 ce); this influence is obvious in their literary genre and in the major philosophical topics they deal with (epistemology, ethics, providence). In his late masterpiece the City of God, Augustine discusses several Ciceronian notions (fate and foreknowledge; populus and respublica; passions) and translates them into a Christian framework: this is the focus of the third section. The last section outlines the evolution of Augustine’s judgment on Cicero, whom he considered a defender of the Neo-Academic position on the one hand, and, on the other, as a spokesman for Platonic philosophy.

Because he stages the contest between the views he endorses and Christianity as a major battle of cultures, Celsus’ mode of discourse shows significant similarities with the register commonly attributed to the Second Sophistic. For the same reason his identity as a philosopher emerges only in the course of Origen’s rebuttal.

Celsus is important evidence for Middle Platonist thought over the nature of the demiurge. This paper argues that he identified the demiurge with an impersonal first principle, the form of the good. In showing how the evidence for Celsus helps to explain the metaphysics at work in this model, it aims to remove doubt that it is a model widely shared by other Platonists.

Celsus is important evidence for Middle Platonist thought over the nature of the demiurge. This paper argues that he identified the demiurge with an impersonal first principle, the form of the good. In showing how the evidence for Celsus helps to explain the metaphysics at work in this model, it aims to remove doubt that it is a model widely shared by other Platonists.

Turning the spotlight onto Celsus as philosopher, this chapter examines his textual use of Heraclitus and Plato, especially when tracing the pedigree of the Alēthēs Logos. His anti-Christian Platonism is compared to Plutarch’s anti-Stoic reception of the New Academy.

Maimonides is one of the most radical defenders of apophaticism, the view according to which no positive attribute can be truthfully applied to God, and that God is consequently ineffable. His apophatic theology has several important dimensions, and it is in the Guide for the Perplexed that he offers the most elaborate account of his views.

Christian monastic literature represents a unique genre within Late-antique and Byzantine literature. Scholars have debated for centuries the diverse influences which shaped such texts, but something of a consensus has emerged that, notwithstanding the obvious and predominant influence of the Christian Bible, these texts have also been influenced by the ethical reflections of Greek philosophy.

It is impossible to deny the obvious parallels between the insights of Greek philosophers—in particular the Neoplatonists (soul-body dualism; a transcendent, otherworldly finality of human existence; a well-ordered society which sublimates individual ambition to the common good) and Stoics (to live 'in accordance with reason' or 'self-sufficiently') —and Christian monastic literature.

This chapter will argue that, although Christian monastic writers rarely had direct access to Greek philosophical texts, they nonetheless absorbed the collective wisdom of these texts as filtered through the Hellenistic Christianity of their day, many of whose chief intellectuals—such as Clement and Origen of Alexandria—had already managed a creative fusion of Greek wisdom with the Christian Gospel.

This paper focuses on Porphyry’s account of the just treatment of non-human animals in his treatise On Abstinence from Killing Animals. In responding to the Stoic argument that justice extends only to rational beings and leaves out non-rational animals, Porphyry introduces a number of considerations to show that animals are not entirely deprived of reason. It is usually assumed that Porphyry thereby commits himself to the view that animals are rational, thus breaking from the tradition of treating rationality as distinctive of humans. This assumption has been recently challenged by G. Fay Edwards, who argues that Porphyry neither believes that animals are rational nor that justice extends only to rational beings, but that he is merely trying to trap the Stoics into admitting that animals are rational and for this reason recipients of justice. I will argue that Porphyry ascribes rationality to animals, although he does not think that this is the reason for treating them justly. Central to my interpretation is Porphyry’s claim that rationality admits of degrees, which allows him to ascribe to animals a certain level of rationality without compromising his Platonic ideals.