BMCR 2009.01.31, Cristina D'Ancona Costa, The Libraries of the Neoplatonists

Cristina D'Ancona Costa (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists.
Proceedings of the Meeting of the European Science Foundation Network
"Late Antiquity and Arabic Thought: Patterns in the Constitution of
European Culture", Strasbourg, March 12-14, 2004. Philosophia antiqua,
v. 107.  Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2007.  Pp. xxxvi, 531.  ISBN
9789004156418.  $199.00.

Reviewed by Christophe F. Erismann, University of Cambridge
([email protected])
Word count:  1749 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

The Neoplatonists held a central role in the transmission and survival
of philosophical texts from Greek Antiquity. As interestingly
established by Richard Goulet in one of the articles in this book, the
texts which are conserved to the present day in direct tradition are
those which were read and commented upon in the Neoplatonic school from
the fourth to the sixth century, or which set out its doctrine, to the
quasi systematic exclusion of other schools of thought. Plato,
Aristotle and their commentators constitute almost the entire corpus of
philosophical texts which is extant from Antiquity in direct tradition.
The French scholar estimates at 4% the proportion of philosophical
texts which are extant and do not belong to this Platonic-Peripatetic
mainstream. Philosophical currents such as Stoicism or Epicureanism are
almost all completely lost in direct tradition, despite the large
number of their texts (for example, according to Diogenes Laertius
(VII, 180), Chrysippus wrote more than 705 books, yet none are extant),
let alone the writings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. This fact
amply justifies the interest which can be taken in the role of
Neoplatonic scholars in the circulation and conservation of the written
heritage of Greek philosophy, which the present volume proposes to
study.

This book, which comprises 27 contributions previously presented as
conference papers, has two purported aims, which correspond to the two
main parts of the volume. The first is to study the "late ancient
version of Greek classical thought" through the study of the conditions
of circulation of the written heritage of Greek philosophy. The second
is to analyse "the influence of Greek philosophy on the culture issuing
from the Qur'an" (Introduction, p. xiii), by highlighting that the
Greek heritage became available to Arab readers mostly in the form it
was given by the schools of late Antiquity. The result is a disparate
collection of detail studies, some of which are excellent, that provide
useful information on the history of texts and their transmission. In
this volume, an approach based on the history of texts and of
manuscripts is favoured over the history and analysis of concepts,
arguments and problems.

Exegesis is an essential feature of Neoplatonic thought in late
Antiquity and the explanation of texts was central to the course of
study of the Neoplatonic schools. Philippe Hoffmann highlights well in
his article how the exegetical practice of the Neoplatonists is
articulated with a certain conception of philosophy. Exegesis itself
produces doctrines and involves constant recourse to the physical
objects that are books, the written support of doctrines. Philosophical
activity, as understood by the Neoplatonists, implies the conservation
of collections of books, and notably of authorities.

One of the strengths of the book is that it highlights the importance
of the so-called Philosophical collection, a set of Byzantine
manuscripts containing philosophical texts, mostly related to the
Neoplatonic tradition. It is an essential intermediary in the process
of transmission of philosophical texts from Antiquity, so essential
that, according to Richard Goulet, without it "we would only have kept
from ancient philosophy a very small corpus of texts, maybe Aristotle's
Organon, as is the case in several eastern traditions" (p. 54,
translation is mine). This set of 17 Greek manuscripts which present
similar codicological and palaeographical characteristics, comes from a
copying centre which is considered to have been situated in
Constantinople around 850. It comprises nothing less than: Plato's
dialogues, the De anima, the De fato and Quaestiones of Alexander of
Aphrodisias, the Didaskalikos of Alkinoos, the Dissertations of Maximus
of Tyre, the treatises of Plotinus, the commentaries on the Republic
and the Timaeus of Proclus, the commentary on the Parmenides and the
treatise De primis principiis of Damascius, the commentaries on the
Physics and the Categories by Simplicius, the commentaries on the
Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and the Alcibiades by Olympiodorus, the treatise
Contra Proclum de aeternitate mundi by John Philoponus, the commentary
on the De interpretatione by Ammonius, the De caelo, the De generatione
et corruptione, the History of animals, the Metaphysics, the
Meteorology and the Physics of Aristotle, as well as Patristic texts
and geographical and astrological writings. The "Platonic" nucleus of
the Philosophical collection is probably made up of copies of remnants
of the library of the philosophical school of Alexandria which had been
brought from Alexandria to Constantinople at a date impossible to state
precisely, but probably falling between the beginning of the seventh
century and the beginning of the ninth century, as has been suggested
by L. G. Westerink.

Henri Dominique Saffrey proposes, in an insightful essay, a study of
one of the manuscripts of the Philosophical collection, the Parisinus
graecus 1807 which contains among other things tetralogies VIII
(Clitophon, Republic, Timaeus, Critias) and IX (Minos, Laws, Epinomis,
Letters) of Plato, with the Definitions and the Spuria. It is the
manuscript A for Plato, made around 850, the model of which went from
Alexandria to Byzantium, and which travelled from Byzantium to Armenia,
and then to the library of Francesco Petrarca.

Guglielmo Cavallo, Philippe Hoffman and Didier Marcotte provide remarks
which complete this study of the Philosophical collection. The textual
tradition of Syrianus' commentary on the Metaphysics and the influence
of Neoplatonists on Byzantine thought are also studied. The second part
of the book contains studies on the dissemination of Neoplatonic texts
in the Syriac-speaking and Arabic-speaking areas. Henri Hugonnard-Roche
provides a useful synthesis article on Syriac philosophical literature
in the sixth and seventh centuries. As to the Arabic tradition, the
influence of Neoplatonism during the Abbasid period, in particular on
al-Kindi (P. Adamson, G. Endress), the presence of Proclus, and the
proximity between sixth-century Alexandrian commentators and the
Baghdad Aristotelian Ibn al-Tayyib are considered.

It is not possible in the limits of this review to consider each
contribution. We may however express an observation, a regret and a
criticism.

This may be inevitable, given the nature of the subject, but a reader
hungry for philosophy may feel a little frustrated. The pre-eminence of
the historical and material aspects of the transmission of texts over
their content, as well as the priority given to common textual formulae
over shared philosophical theses, leads unavoidably to a lack of
doctrinal considerations. While separating the study of the
transmission of texts from the history of concepts has the advantage of
highlighting the often neglected material aspect of the history of
texts, it has the disadvantage that it offers quite an un-philosophical
history of Neoplatonism.

The relative lack of questioning regarding the Neoplatonic intellectual
project is regrettable. The transmission of texts, their arrangement
into a course of study with a precise order, and the constitution of an
exegesis were part of an intellectual project. It is unfortunate that
the connection between the work of collection, conservation and
transmission of texts by the Neoplatonists -- of which some aspects are
well studied in this volume -- and the study of the curriculum and the
philosophy of exegesis developed in the Neoplatonic school, and even
the project of harmonisation of the philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle, is not better highlighted. The phenomenon of the
transmission of texts would then be illuminated by some of the reasons
which motivated it.

The part of the book dedicated to the non-Greek traditions raises a
methodological question. Even if we must assess a book on what is
contains (in this case, the welcome study of the Arabic and, more
briefly, of the Syriac, Armenian and Hebrew traditions) more than on
what it should contain, I would like to note the absence of any
consideration of the Latin world. This gives an unbalanced view of the
transmission of Greek philosophical texts in late Antiquity, because a
notable part of the Latin history of this transmission is contemporary
to the authors discussed in the book. Did Boethius or Marius Victorinus
not play any role in the transmission of classical Greek philosophy
during late Antiquity? At least an explanation for the highly debatable
choice of excluding the Latin tradition while taking into consideration
almost all the others should have been included.

Cristina d'Ancona, "The Libraries of the Neoplatonists. An
Introduction"


Part One
Plato, Aristotle and their Neoplatonic Readings: the Greek Tradition


Henri Dominique Saffrey, "Retour sur le Parisinus graecus 1807, le
manuscrit A de Platon"
Richard Goulet, "La conservation et la transmission des textes
philosophiques grecs"
Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze/, "Deux traite/s plotiniens chez Euse\be de
Ce/sare/e"
Burkhard Reis, "Curricula vix mutantur. Zur Vorgeschichte der
neuplatonischen Lektuereprogramme"
Concetta Luna, "Mise en page et transmission textuelle du commentaire
de Syrianus sur la Me/taphysique"
Philippe Hoffmann, "Les bibliothe\ques philosophiques d'apre\s le
te/moignage de la litte/rature ne/oplatonicienne des Ve et VIe
sie\cles"
Guglielmo Cavallo, "Qualche riflessione sulla 'collezione filosofica'"
Didier Marcotte, "Le corpus ge/ographique de Heidelberg (Palat.
Heidelb. gr. 398) et les origines de la 'collection philosophique'"
Michel Cacouros, "Survie culturelle et re/manence textuelle du
ne/oplatonisme a\ Byzance. E/le/ments ge/ne/raux, e/le/ments portant
sur la logique"
Eudoxie Delli, "Entre compilation et originalite/. Le corps pneumatique
dans l'oeuvre de Michel Psellos"
Aris Papamanolakis, "L'e/chelle ne/oplatonicienne des vertus chez
Psellus et chez Eustrate de Nice/e"
Pante/lis Golitsis, "Nice/phore Blemmyde lecteur du commentaire de
Simplicius a\ la Physique d'Aristote"


Part Two
The Transmission of Texts and the Creation of the Philosophical Corpus
in Armenian, Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew


Valentina Calzolari, "Aux origines de la formation du corpus
philosophique en Arme/nie: quelques remarques sur les versions
arme/niennes des commentaires grecs de David"
Henri Hugonnard-Roche, "Le corpus philosophique syriaque aux VI-VIIe
sie\cles"
Sebastian P. Brock, "A Syriac Intermediary for the Arabic Theology of
Aristotle? In Search of a Chimera"
Vittorio Berti, "Libri e biblioteche cristiane nell'Iraq dell'VIII
secolo. Una testimonianza dell'epistolario del patriarca siro-orientale
Timoteo I (727-823)"
Gehrard Endress, "Building the Library of Arabic Philosophy. Platonism
and Aristotelianism in the Sources of al-Kindi"
Peter Adamson, "The Kindian Tradition. The Structure of Philosophy in
Arabic Neoplatonism"
Dimitri Gutas, "The Text of the Arabic Plotinus. Prolegomena to a
Critical Edition"
Hinrich Biesterfeldt, "Palladius on the Hippocratic Aphorisms"
Meryem Sebti, "Une copie inconnue d'une paraphrase anonyme conserve/e
en arabe du De anima d'Aristote: le MS Ayasofia 4156"
Emily Cottrell, "L'Anonyme d'Oxford (Bodleian Or. Marsh 539):
bibliothe\que ou commentaire?"
James E. Montgomery, "Al-Gahiz and Hellenizing Philosophy"
Elvira Wakelnig, "Al-'Amiri's Paraphrase of the Proclean Elements of
Theology. A Search for Possible Sources and Parallel Texts"
Cleopha Ferrari, "Die Kategorie der Relation in der griechischen und
arabischen Aristoteles-Kommentierung"
Daniel De Smet, "Les Bibliothe\ques ismae/liennes et la question du
ne/oplatonisme ismae/lien"
Stephen Harvey, "The Greek Library of the Medieval Jewish Philosophers"