Course Content (Syllabus)
Systematic presentation of the philosophical trends of the Alexandrian age with special emphasis upon the teachings of the school of Potrico and the Garden.
1) After Plato and Aristotle: mapping the landscape of Greek philosophy in the postclassical era
2) The Lyceum from the fourth until the first century AD: Theophrastus, Eudemus, Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Demetrius of Phalerum, Strato, Lyko, Aristo, Critolaus, Andronicus, Boethus
3) Arcesilaus and Carneades: the shift of the Academy towards skepticism and Pyrrho
4) The Garden: Part I (The empiricism of Epicurus and the adoption of the Democritean theory of atoms and void)
5) The Garden: Part II (The teaching of Epicurus on man, society, pain and pleasure)
6) The Ancient Stoa: Part I: formal logic, syllogism, categories, theory of tabula rasa, of common notions (κοινῶν ἐννοιῶν) and of cognitive impression (καταληπτικῆς φαντασίας)
7) The Ancient Stoa: Part II: the return to the monism of Presocratic thought and the elaboration of a new worldview by Zeno and his students on the basis of Heraclitan physics
8) The Ancient Stoa: Part III: to live according to nature (ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν), individual and universal Logos, passionlessness (ἀπάθεια), cosmopolitanism, the ideal of the Stoic sage
9) The Middle Stoa: the evolution of Stoic philosophy and its mixing with Platonic elements in the work of Posidonius
10) The Cynics of the Hellenistic period (Bion of Borysthenes, Menippus, Menedemus, Phoenix of Colophon, etc.)
11) Aspects of Hellenistic philosophy: (a) the utopian State of Zeno or the gospel of philosophical, social radicalism, (b) the mixtum genus of Dicaearchus and his influence on Polybius, (c) the monarchical ideal in the pseudo-Pythagorean fragments of Stobaeus and other sources of the era
12) Judaic philosophy: (a) echoes of Platonic and Stoic ideas in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament (b) Philo of Alexandria and his predecessors of the intellectual circles of the Jewish Diaspora
13) Doxography, approach among the schools and the beginnings of philosophical eclecticism in antiquity
Keywords
Ancient Greece-Philosophy, History of Ideas, Hellenistic Philosophy, Hellenism and Christianity, Ancient Philosophy-Epicuros-Stoicism-Skepticism-Cynism, Judaic Philosophy
Additional bibliography for study
1. Α.A. Long, Η Ελληνιστική Φιλοσοφία (Στωικοί, Επικούρειοι, Σκεπτικοί), μτφ. από τα αγγλικά Σ. Δημόπουλος και Μ. Δραγώνα–Μοναχού, Αθήνα 1987
2. R.W. Sharples, Μια εισαγωγή στην Ελληνιστική Φιλοσοφία (Στωικοί, Επικούρειοι και Σκεπτικοί), μτφ. Μ. Λυπουρλή-Γ. Αβραμίδης και επιμ. Κ. Καούκη, Θεσσαλονίκη 2002
3. K. Algra κ.ά. (επιμ.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge 1999
4. A. Kamesar (επιμ.), The Cambridge Companion to Philo, Cambridge 2009