Essays in Later Ancient Philosophy

Essays in Later Ancient Philosophy is a collection of Michael Frede’s papers on topics in later ancient philosophy. They centre on pagan and Christian philosophers including Celsus, Numenius, Longinus, Syrianus, Origen, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damascus. In the essays, Frede shows how these figures are significant thinkers in their own right, and testimony to the vitality of philosophical thought of later antiquity.

Topics covered in the volume include ethics, theology, metaphysics, and psychology. A common theme across the papers is the growth and mutual interaction of Platonism and Christian philosophical thinking from the late second century onwards. Frede shows how the period is marked by increasing engagement with philosophical authorities of the past (such as Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in the case of Platonism), and with ancient traditions of wisdom on which they in turn were taken to rely.

Michael Frede, sometime Professor of the History of Philosophy, University of Oxford

Michael Frede (1940-2007) studied in Göttingen with Günther Patzig and obtained his PhD with a thesis on Plato’s Sophist in 1967. He taught at Göttingen, Berkeley, Princeton, and, finally, Oxford as Professor of the History of Philosophy. Frede retired in 2005 and moved to Athens. He did pioneering work on Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic philosophers, especially on the Stoics and Sceptics. Frede also pioneered the study of philosophy, including Christian philosophy, in later antiquity.

George Boys-Stones read Classics at Christ’s College Cambridge, and wrote his doctoral dissertation (on Plutarch and the Stoics) under the supervision of Michael Frede at St John’s College, Oxford. As a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Boys-Stones started working on philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean during the period 100 BC to 200 AD. He taught in the Classics Department at Durham University for 20 years from 1999, serving as Head of Department between 2009 and 2012. In 2019 Boys-Stones moved to the University of Toronto, where he is now Chair of the Department of Classics.

George Karamanolis is Professor in Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He works primarily on ancient philosophy while maintaining research interests in Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. His publications include Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? (OUP 2006), Studies on Porphyry (2007), The Philosophy of Early Christianity (2013), The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy (2018), and Pseudo-Aristotle On the Cosmos: A Commentary (2021). Karamanolis is currently working on a new edition of the Magna Moralia.