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Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity, 2018
By: Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Renaud, François (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.), Layne, Danielle A. (Ed.)

Title	Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity
Type	Edited Book
Language	English
Date	2018
Publication Place	Boston
Publisher	Brill
Series	Brill's companions to classical reception
Volume	13
Categories	no categories
Author(s)
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Renaud, François , Baltzly, Dirk , Layne, Danielle A.
Translator(s)

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical Greece, from his death in the fourth century BCE until the Platonist and Aristotelian commentators in the sixth century CE. The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Early Developments in Reception’ (four chapters); ‘Early Imperial Reception’ (nine chapters); and ‘Early Christianity and Late Antique Platonism’ (eighteen chapters). Sectional introductions cover matters of importance that could not easily be covered in dedicated chapters. The book demonstrates the great variety of approaches to and interpretations of Plato among even his most dedicated ancient readers, offering some salutary lessons for his modern readers too.

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/QcrfTiTc1S1E4gY

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Simplicius of Cilicia: Plato's last interpreter, 2018
By: Gabor, Gary, Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Renaud, François (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.), Layne, Danielle A. (Ed.)

Title	Simplicius of Cilicia: Plato's last interpreter
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2018
Published in	Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity
Pages	569-579
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Gabor, Gary
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Renaud, François , Baltzly, Dirk , Layne, Danielle A.
Translator(s)

Simplicius is well regarded today as an insightful comprehensive, detailed, sometimes repetitive, but generally useful and reliable interpreter of Aristotle. How he reads other authors though - with the possible exception of the Presocratics - is less well studied. In this chapter myaim is to examine Simplicius' interpretation of Plato. By this I mean not Simplicius' views regarding Platonism (though these of course influenced his interpretation), but rather the ways in which Simplicius read the particular dialogues written by Plato, as well as the history that had accumulated by his time regarding Plato's life and thought. While something of a picaresque task, given that Simplicius' extant commentaries all center on texts of either Aristotle or the Stoic Epictetus - the Physics, De Caelo, Categories, and, disputedly, the De Anima, as well as the Enchiridion - nevertheless, his frequent references, allusions, and discussions of Plato's works in his writing provide ample evidence for gathering a good working picture of how Simplicius read him. [Introduction, pp. 569 f.]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/0vKTn6WTHOuGWRm

The Transformation of Plato and Aristotle, 2006
By: Sorabji, Richard, Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.)

Title	The Transformation of Plato and Aristotle
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2006
Published in	Reading Plato in antiquity
Pages	185-193
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Sorabji, Richard
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Baltzly, Dirk
Translator(s)

In Neoplatonism, though not in Aristotelianism, Plato and Aristotle are transformed in a variety of different ways. The transformation is partly driven by a wish to harmonize Plato and Aristotle, but only partly. There is less effort to harmonize the two in some commentators than in others, and on some issues, as we shall see, there is less harmonization among our commentators than there was in the Middle Platonism of an earlier period. Further, the transformation of views is driven by other factors besides harmonization. Harmonization is most marked in Porphyry and Ammonius. It seems to be least favored by Syrianus and Proclus. Simplicius says that the good commentator should find Plato and Aristotle in harmony on most points (In Cat. 7.23–32). The presumption for a Neoplatonist is that, in the case of disharmony, Plato will be right. However, this presumption is reversed by a late commentator, Olympiodorus, who backs Aristotle against Plato on the definition of relatives (In Cat. 112.19ff). As an example of harmonization, Porphyry, on the standard interpretation, defended Aristotle’s categories from Plotinus’ objections in Enneads VI.1–3. Plotinus accepted only four of Aristotle’s ten categories for classifying the world perceived by the senses, and even then with heavy qualifications. He complained that Aristotle’s categories left out the world of intelligible Forms from which the perceptible world derived. Sensible qualities, for example, are only shadows of the activities of intelligible Forms. Porphyry replied (In Cat. 57.7–8, 58.5–7, and 91.19–27) that Aristotle’s categories are not meant to be exhaustive. They are only intended to distinguish words insofar as they signify things, and words are chiefly used to speak about sensibles. For that limited task, the categories are to be valued. Porphyry thus made Aristotle’s categories forever acceptable to Platonism. Hereafter, it became increasingly useful to reinforce what I regard as the myth of harmony in the face of Christian charges that pagan philosophers contradicted each other. There was an irony in this, because the harmonization—whose motive was thus partly anti-Christian—ended in the thirteenth century by helping Thomas Aquinas present Aristotle as safe for Christianity. This assimilation to Plato had turned Aristotle’s God from a thinker into a Creator and Aristotle’s human soul into an immortal one. There can, however, be more than one approach toward the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle. Lloyd Gerson, in this volume, offers the most thoroughgoing modern attempt to argue that it is basically correct. If, as I have supposed, it is not, the question arises whether pressure toward a false harmonization would be bad for philosophy. Having to convince Christians that Plato and Aristotle agreed with each other on almost everything would surely lead to a loss of their wonderful insights. But in fact, it gave a distinctive character, interesting in its own right, to Neoplatonism. Curiously, it also led to an even closer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle, because their texts had to be read very closely indeed if one was going to argue that what they really meant was something different from what might first appear. In fact, the pressure to harmonize proved a valuable stimulus to the imagination in the Greek Neoplatonist commentators. They took Plato to postulate a changeless and timeless world of divine Platonic Forms, and they had to think out how such a world would relate to the temporal, changing world described by Aristotle. I should now like to look at some examples of what happened to the views of Plato and Aristotle in Neoplatonism. I shall ask what factors besides harmonization are at work, whether Plato is transformed in the process as much as Aristotle, whether the harmonizations are hostile or friendly to Aristotle, and where the transformations proved important for subsequent philosophy. [introduction p. 185-186]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/eWLLcrq58WWLfJm

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The transformation is partly driven by a wish to harmonize Plato and Aristotle, but only partly. There is less effort to harmonize the two in some commentators than in others, and on some issues, as we shall see, there is less harmonization among our commentators than there was in the Middle Platonism of an earlier period. Further, the transformation of views is driven by other factors besides harmonization.\r\n\r\nHarmonization is most marked in Porphyry and Ammonius. It seems to be least favored by Syrianus and Proclus. Simplicius says that the good commentator should find Plato and Aristotle in harmony on most points (In Cat. 7.23\u201332). The presumption for a Neoplatonist is that, in the case of disharmony, Plato will be right. However, this presumption is reversed by a late commentator, Olympiodorus, who backs Aristotle against Plato on the definition of relatives (In Cat. 112.19ff).\r\n\r\nAs an example of harmonization, Porphyry, on the standard interpretation, defended Aristotle\u2019s categories from Plotinus\u2019 objections in Enneads VI.1\u20133. Plotinus accepted only four of Aristotle\u2019s ten categories for classifying the world perceived by the senses, and even then with heavy qualifications. He complained that Aristotle\u2019s categories left out the world of intelligible Forms from which the perceptible world derived. Sensible qualities, for example, are only shadows of the activities of intelligible Forms. Porphyry replied (In Cat. 57.7\u20138, 58.5\u20137, and 91.19\u201327) that Aristotle\u2019s categories are not meant to be exhaustive. They are only intended to distinguish words insofar as they signify things, and words are chiefly used to speak about sensibles. For that limited task, the categories are to be valued. Porphyry thus made Aristotle\u2019s categories forever acceptable to Platonism. Hereafter, it became increasingly useful to reinforce what I regard as the myth of harmony in the face of Christian charges that pagan philosophers contradicted each other. There was an irony in this, because the harmonization\u2014whose motive was thus partly anti-Christian\u2014ended in the thirteenth century by helping Thomas Aquinas present Aristotle as safe for Christianity. This assimilation to Plato had turned Aristotle\u2019s God from a thinker into a Creator and Aristotle\u2019s human soul into an immortal one.\r\n\r\nThere can, however, be more than one approach toward the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle. Lloyd Gerson, in this volume, offers the most thoroughgoing modern attempt to argue that it is basically correct. If, as I have supposed, it is not, the question arises whether pressure toward a false harmonization would be bad for philosophy. Having to convince Christians that Plato and Aristotle agreed with each other on almost everything would surely lead to a loss of their wonderful insights. But in fact, it gave a distinctive character, interesting in its own right, to Neoplatonism. Curiously, it also led to an even closer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle, because their texts had to be read very closely indeed if one was going to argue that what they really meant was something different from what might first appear.\r\n\r\nIn fact, the pressure to harmonize proved a valuable stimulus to the imagination in the Greek Neoplatonist commentators. They took Plato to postulate a changeless and timeless world of divine Platonic Forms, and they had to think out how such a world would relate to the temporal, changing world described by Aristotle.\r\n\r\nI should now like to look at some examples of what happened to the views of Plato and Aristotle in Neoplatonism. I shall ask what factors besides harmonization are at work, whether Plato is transformed in the process as much as Aristotle, whether the harmonizations are hostile or friendly to Aristotle, and where the transformations proved important for subsequent philosophy. [introduction p. 185-186]","btype":2,"date":"2006","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/eWLLcrq58WWLfJm","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":133,"full_name":"Sorabji, Richard","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}},{"id":122,"full_name":"Tarrant, Harold ","role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"}},{"id":107,"full_name":"Baltzly, Dirk","role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"}}],"book":null,"booksection":{"id":916,"section_of":196,"pages":"185-193","is_catalog":null,"book":{"id":196,"bilderberg_idno":null,"dare_idno":null,"catalog_idno":null,"entry_type":null,"type":4,"language":"en","title":"Reading Plato in antiquity","title_transcript":"","title_translation":"","short_title":"Tarrant2006","has_no_author":null,"volume":null,"date":"2006","edition_no":null,"free_date":"2006","abstract":"This important collection of original essays is the first to concentrate at length on how the ancients responded to the challenge of reading and interpreting Plato, primarily between 100 BC and AD, edited by Lloyd Gerson, University of Toronto; 600. It incorporates the fruits of recent research into late antique philosophy, in particular its approach to hermeneutical problems. While a number of prominent figures, including Apuleius, Galen, Plotinus, Porphyry and lamblichus, receive detailed attention, several essays concentrate on the important figure of Proclus, in whom Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato reaches it most impressive, most surprising and most challenging form. The essays appear in chronological of their focal interpreters, giving a sense of the development of Platonist exegesis in this period. Reflecting their devotion to a common theme, the essays have been carefully edited and are presented with a composite bibliography and indices.","republication_of":null,"online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/PFetB36hpbaF0VD","translation_of":null,"new_edition_of":null,"is_catalog":0,"in_bibliography":0,"is_inactive":0,"notes":null,"doi_url":null,"book":{"id":196,"pubplace":"London","publisher":"Bloomsbury Academic","series":"","volume":"","edition_no":"","valid_from":null,"valid_until":null}}},"article":null},"sort":[2006]}

Reading Plato in antiquity, 2006
By: Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.)

Title	Reading Plato in antiquity
Type	Edited Book
Language	English
Date	2006
Publication Place	London
Publisher	Bloomsbury Academic
Categories	no categories
Author(s)
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Baltzly, Dirk
Translator(s)

This important collection of original essays is the first to concentrate at length on how the ancients responded to the challenge of reading and interpreting Plato, primarily between 100 BC and AD, edited by Lloyd Gerson, University of Toronto; 600. It incorporates the fruits of recent research into late antique philosophy, in particular its approach to hermeneutical problems. While a number of prominent figures, including Apuleius, Galen, Plotinus, Porphyry and lamblichus, receive detailed attention, several essays concentrate on the important figure of Proclus, in whom Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato reaches it most impressive, most surprising and most challenging form. The essays appear in chronological of their focal interpreters, giving a sense of the development of Platonist exegesis in this period. Reflecting their devotion to a common theme, the essays have been carefully edited and are presented with a composite bibliography and indices.

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/PFetB36hpbaF0VD

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What goes up: Proclus against Aristotle on the fifth element, 2002
By: Baltzly, Dirk

Title	What goes up: Proclus against Aristotle on the fifth element
Type	Article
Language	English
Date	2002
Journal	Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Volume	80
Issue	3
Pages	261-287
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Baltzly, Dirk
Editor(s)
Translator(s)

In this paper, I consider Proclus’ arguments against Aristotle on the composition of the heavens from the fifth element, the aether. Proclus argues for the Platonic view (Timaeus 40a) that the heavenly bodies are composed of all four elements, with fire predominating. I think that his discussion exhibits all the methodological features that we find admirable in Aristotle’s largely a priori proto-science. Proclus’ treatment of the question in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus also provides the fullest statement of a neoplatonic alternative to the Aristotelian theory of the elements. As such, it forms a significant part of a still largely underappreciated neoplatonic legacy to the history of science. [authors abstract]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/tOMemjPbvEoCytl

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PAGE 1 OF 1

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity, 2018
By: Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Renaud, François (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.), Layne, Danielle A. (Ed.)

Title	Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity
Type	Edited Book
Language	English
Date	2018
Publication Place	Boston
Publisher	Brill
Series	Brill's companions to classical reception
Volume	13
Categories	no categories
Author(s)
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Renaud, François , Baltzly, Dirk , Layne, Danielle A.
Translator(s)

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical Greece, from his death in the fourth century BCE until the Platonist and Aristotelian commentators in the sixth century CE. The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Early Developments in Reception’ (four chapters); ‘Early Imperial Reception’ (nine chapters); and ‘Early Christianity and Late Antique Platonism’ (eighteen chapters). Sectional introductions cover matters of importance that could not easily be covered in dedicated chapters. The book demonstrates the great variety of approaches to and interpretations of Plato among even his most dedicated ancient readers, offering some salutary lessons for his modern readers too.

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/QcrfTiTc1S1E4gY

Reading Plato in antiquity, 2006
By: Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.)

Title	Reading Plato in antiquity
Type	Edited Book
Language	English
Date	2006
Publication Place	London
Publisher	Bloomsbury Academic
Categories	no categories
Author(s)
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Baltzly, Dirk
Translator(s)

This important collection of original essays is the first to concentrate at length on how the ancients responded to the challenge of reading and interpreting Plato, primarily between 100 BC and AD, edited by Lloyd Gerson, University of Toronto; 600. It incorporates the fruits of recent research into late antique philosophy, in particular its approach to hermeneutical problems. While a number of prominent figures, including Apuleius, Galen, Plotinus, Porphyry and lamblichus, receive detailed attention, several essays concentrate on the important figure of Proclus, in whom Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato reaches it most impressive, most surprising and most challenging form. The essays appear in chronological of their focal interpreters, giving a sense of the development of Platonist exegesis in this period. Reflecting their devotion to a common theme, the essays have been carefully edited and are presented with a composite bibliography and indices.

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/PFetB36hpbaF0VD

Simplicius of Cilicia: Plato's last interpreter, 2018
By: Gabor, Gary, Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Renaud, François (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.), Layne, Danielle A. (Ed.)

Title	Simplicius of Cilicia: Plato's last interpreter
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2018
Published in	Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity
Pages	569-579
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Gabor, Gary
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Renaud, François , Baltzly, Dirk , Layne, Danielle A.
Translator(s)

Simplicius is well regarded today as an insightful comprehensive, detailed, sometimes repetitive, but generally useful and reliable interpreter of Aristotle. How he reads other authors though - with the possible exception of the Presocratics - is less well studied. In this chapter myaim is to examine Simplicius' interpretation of Plato. By this I mean not Simplicius' views regarding Platonism (though these of course influenced his interpretation), but rather the ways in which Simplicius read the particular dialogues written by Plato, as well as the history that had accumulated by his time regarding Plato's life and thought. While something of a picaresque task, given that Simplicius' extant commentaries all center on texts of either Aristotle or the Stoic Epictetus -  the Physics, De Caelo,  Categories, and, disputedly, the De Anima, as well as the Enchiridion - nevertheless, his frequent references, allusions, and discussions of Plato's works in his writing provide ample evidence for gathering a good working picture of how Simplicius read him. [Introduction, pp. 569 f.]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/0vKTn6WTHOuGWRm

The Transformation of Plato and Aristotle, 2006
By: Sorabji, Richard, Tarrant, Harold (Ed.), Baltzly, Dirk (Ed.)

Title	The Transformation of Plato and Aristotle
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2006
Published in	Reading Plato in antiquity
Pages	185-193
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Sorabji, Richard
Editor(s)	Tarrant, Harold , Baltzly, Dirk
Translator(s)

Harmonization is most marked in Porphyry and Ammonius. It seems to be least favored by Syrianus and Proclus. Simplicius says that the good commentator should find Plato and Aristotle in harmony on most points (In Cat. 7.23–32). The presumption for a Neoplatonist is that, in the case of disharmony, Plato will be right. However, this presumption is reversed by a late commentator, Olympiodorus, who backs Aristotle against Plato on the definition of relatives (In Cat. 112.19ff).

As an example of harmonization, Porphyry, on the standard interpretation, defended Aristotle’s categories from Plotinus’ objections in Enneads VI.1–3. Plotinus accepted only four of Aristotle’s ten categories for classifying the world perceived by the senses, and even then with heavy qualifications. He complained that Aristotle’s categories left out the world of intelligible Forms from which the perceptible world derived. Sensible qualities, for example, are only shadows of the activities of intelligible Forms. Porphyry replied (In Cat. 57.7–8, 58.5–7, and 91.19–27) that Aristotle’s categories are not meant to be exhaustive. They are only intended to distinguish words insofar as they signify things, and words are chiefly used to speak about sensibles. For that limited task, the categories are to be valued. Porphyry thus made Aristotle’s categories forever acceptable to Platonism. Hereafter, it became increasingly useful to reinforce what I regard as the myth of harmony in the face of Christian charges that pagan philosophers contradicted each other. There was an irony in this, because the harmonization—whose motive was thus partly anti-Christian—ended in the thirteenth century by helping Thomas Aquinas present Aristotle as safe for Christianity. This assimilation to Plato had turned Aristotle’s God from a thinker into a Creator and Aristotle’s human soul into an immortal one.

There can, however, be more than one approach toward the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle. Lloyd Gerson, in this volume, offers the most thoroughgoing modern attempt to argue that it is basically correct. If, as I have supposed, it is not, the question arises whether pressure toward a false harmonization would be bad for philosophy. Having to convince Christians that Plato and Aristotle agreed with each other on almost everything would surely lead to a loss of their wonderful insights. But in fact, it gave a distinctive character, interesting in its own right, to Neoplatonism. Curiously, it also led to an even closer reading of the texts of Plato and Aristotle, because their texts had to be read very closely indeed if one was going to argue that what they really meant was something different from what might first appear.

In fact, the pressure to harmonize proved a valuable stimulus to the imagination in the Greek Neoplatonist commentators. They took Plato to postulate a changeless and timeless world of divine Platonic Forms, and they had to think out how such a world would relate to the temporal, changing world described by Aristotle.

I should now like to look at some examples of what happened to the views of Plato and Aristotle in Neoplatonism. I shall ask what factors besides harmonization are at work, whether Plato is transformed in the process as much as Aristotle, whether the harmonizations are hostile or friendly to Aristotle, and where the transformations proved important for subsequent philosophy. [introduction p. 185-186]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/eWLLcrq58WWLfJm

What goes up: Proclus against Aristotle on the fifth element, 2002
By: Baltzly, Dirk

Title	What goes up: Proclus against Aristotle on the fifth element
Type	Article
Language	English
Date	2002
Journal	Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Volume	80
Issue	3
Pages	261-287
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Baltzly, Dirk
Editor(s)
Translator(s)

In this paper, I consider Proclus’ arguments against Aristotle on the composition of the 
heavens from the fifth element, the aether. Proclus argues for the Platonic view (Timaeus 
40a) that the heavenly bodies are composed of all four elements, with fire predominating. 
I think that his discussion exhibits all the methodological features that we find admirable 
in  Aristotle’s  largely  a priori  proto-science.  Proclus’  treatment  of the  question  in  his 
commentary  on  Plato’s  Timaeus  also  provides  the  fullest  statement  of a  neoplatonic 
alternative to the Aristotelian theory of the elements. As such, it forms a significant part of 
a  still  largely underappreciated neoplatonic  legacy to  the history of science. [authors abstract]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/tOMemjPbvEoCytl

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