Theory and Practice in Roman Mediterranean Philosophy 2023 Workshop

Philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean: Towards a History - About the Project

The post-Hellenistic period (100 BC-250 AD) saw an exciting efflorescence of philosophical activity. This project is working towards a major new collaborative history of the period which starts from a recognition that its intellectual structures are pan-Mediterranean in character. Instead of an east-west divide between a scholarship which looks back to the Athenian schools and new religious movements looking forward to Neoplatonism and Christianity, we aim to describe a shared, but geographically dispersed, intellectual arena in which major shifts in philosophy arise from new opportunities for debate.

Project PIs

George Boys-Stones (Toronto), Matthias Haake (Tubingen).

Theory and Practice in Roman Mediterranean Philosophy - About the Workshop

The second in our workshop series Philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean will address the challenge of coordinating evidence for philosophical activity in the Post-Hellenistic period which is historically located but theoretically conservative with evidence for theoretical activity that is innovative but hard to locate historically.

Speakers & Titles

• George Boys-Stones (University of Toronto): The Aristotelian De Mundo: Evidence for Second-Century Debate from an Undatable Text
• Bram Demulder (Leiden University): Plutarch and “The Many”
• Tiziano Dorandi (CNRS, Paris): The Transmission of Philosophy in the Mediterranean World: From the Library of Philodemus in Herculaneum to the Sands of Egypt
• Paul Du Plessis (University of Edinburgh): Integrating a Foreign Influence: Roman Law and Greek Philosophy
• Matthias Haake (University of Münster): Historiography and the Role of Philosophers in the Mediterranean World - from Late Hellenistic/Late Republican Times to the Middle of the Third Century
• Inna Kupreeva (University of Edinburgh): Reinventing Aristotelian Metaphysics
• Alberto Rigolio (Durham University): Bardaisan and Post-Hellenistic Philosophy
• Courtney Roby (Cornell University): Thinking through the World: the Philosophical-Experimental Frontier
• Thomas Slabon (University of South Florida): You Are Gods: The Democratization of Deification in Early Christian Philosophy
• Christian Wildberg (University of Pittsburgh): The Corpus Hermeticum

Further information about the project and the workshop is available on Philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean: Towards a History page.