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Édition critique, traduction française, introduction et notes par Jean-François Pradeau
Porphyre (234 – 305), disciple de Plotin et éditeur de ses Ennéades, adresse cette Lettre à Marcella, une femme d’un certain âge qu’il a épousée sur le tard. Il lui explique la raison de son départ, après seulement dix mois de mariage. Il l’invite, loin de toute passion, à mener une vie philosophique dont il lui rappelle les grands principes éthiques, inspirés de Platon. Porphyre livre ici une apologie de la philosophie traditionnelle, dirigée contre les croyances irrationnelles. La Lettre à Marcella est un document unique sur la manière dont une vie philosophique peut être vécue.
Le texte de la Lettre a Marcella n’a été conservé que dans un unique manuscrit, recopié au XVe s. Il est ici édité, traduit et présenté.

Porphyrius (234 – 305), Plotinus’ disciple and editor of his Enneads, addresses his letter to Marcella, an aging woman, whom he married late in life. He explains to her the reasons for leaving her, after only ten months of marriage. He invites her to leave passions behind to lead a philosophical life along the lines of the major ethical principles inspired by Plato. Porphyrius takes a strong stand as an apologist of traditional philosophical teachings. The Letter to Marcella provides a unique account on the ways and principles along which a philosophical life should be led.
The Letter to Marcella survives as a single manuscript that dates from the 15th century. It is here introduced, edited, translated and annotated.
This volume sheds new light on Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Mixture and Growth as an intelligent and carefully crafted rebuttal of Stoic blending, which Alexander regarded as the closest rival of his own brand of hylomorphism. The authors explore Alexander’s dialectical method and determine the precise character of the Stoic theory he attacks. The problematic notions of mutual co-extension and infinite division appear in their proper context, while the successive stages of the process of blending are carefully distinguished from the resulting state of the blend. In this perspective the discussion of growth that closes Alexander’s work finds its natural place.
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The papyrological writings of Philodemus of Gadara continue to yield crucial new insights on key aspects of ancient Epicureanism. In fact, they even shed light on the Epicurean paragon of human wisdom and happiness itself: the sage.
From the many references to the wise person’s characteristics that can be found scattered throughout Philodemus’ ethics, a uniquely detailed and multifaceted portrait of the Epicurean sage emerges. This is the first book-length study of the Epicurean sage. It explores the different aspects of the sage’s way of life and offers a reconstruction of this Epicurean role model, as envisaged by Philodemus.
Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Lorenzo Corti
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Arithmetic deals with numbers: but what is the nature of their existence, of their parts, and of their relationship with countable items? These questions nourished a lively debate between the Platonico-Pythagorean tradition (trying to answer them) and the Pyrrhonian tradition (trying to show that these answers were unsatisfactory). The debate lies at the heart of Sextus Empiricus’ Against the Arithmeticians. The present book aims at facing the remarkable historical and philosophical questions raised by Sextus’ treatise by offering a new translation of it and the first dedicated commentary to it.
This volume, the 37th year of published proceedings, contains five papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during 2022. Topics: Plato: Phaedo, where Socrates undermines his explicit arguments for immortality with quotes from his predecessors; Statesman, with Socrates’ impending death an occasion to reconsider the roles of dialectic, expertise, myth, image and law; Aristotle: De Caelo, examining inclination, natural places, and the elements, with a strong dissent in the comment; Metaphysics N that differentiate mathematical features from natural explanation, with the comment raising challenging anomalies. Finally, Plotinus on union with the One and human happiness, as frequent and common. The comments challenge or sustain the theses in the main papers.
An Inquiry into the Textual Transmission of Porphyry’s Philosophy according to the Chaldean Oracles
This book gives us a new perspective on the Philosophy according to the Chaldean Oracles by Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 232/305 CE), demonstrating that much of what we thought we knew about this work and its fragments is mistaken. Here, for the first time, the attempt is made at reconstructing the original text by following the vicissitudes of its reception and transmission from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up to modern scholarship.
The extensive and painstaking study of the surviving fragments leads to the radically innovative conclusion that this encyclopedic treatise, written by Porphyry in the last decades of the 3rd century CE, consisted of fifteen books organized in various sections. After an initial discussion of the nature of theurgy and of its subordinate role with respect to philosophy, Porphyry describes the entire history of Greek philosophy from Homer up to his own teacher Plotinus, to then go on to present “introductions” to the seven encyclical disciplines whose study is required for the comprehension of theosophy, that is, the esoteric speculation on the three parts of philosophy: anthropology-ethics, physics, and metaphysics-theology.
By harmonizing the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Chaldean Oracles, Porphyry intends to present the complete and definitive philosophic system, with the aim of showing the universal way for the liberation of the souls of initiates and of contextually fighting the final battle of the Greco-Roman civilization against Christianity.
Rhetoric, Linguistics and Philosophical Theology in Origen, Contra Celsum 4.1-22
Can the Divine itself come down to earth? The Platonist Celsus rejected it as most shameful, Origen however defended this idea as an essential part of Christian doctrine. This book comments on passages from Origen’s Against Celsus 4 in which both authors put forward their arguments. The Greek text is discussed from three perspectives: linguistics, rhetoric and philosophical theology. This approach includes a focus on the communication between author and readers, the structure of the discourse, and the persuasive strategies used by Celsus and Origen. Attention is also given to conceptions of God and his relation to the world, which form the backdrop to their arguments. Moreover, their theological conceptions are related to the wider philosophical discourse of the Greco-Roman age.
This book shows that a rigorous study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not simply an exercise in the history of astronomy, but constitutes a broad inquiry into our germinal ideas about speed, motion, and the spherical nature of celestial entities, as well as the relation between theology and gnoseology. Many have heard of Aristotle’s First Unmoved Mover, the one that moves all things without being moved. Very few, however, have managed to capture the ultimate meaning of that entity. One of the goals of this book is to explore why the existence of such a First Unmoved Mover is necessary, but the journey to this end allows us to understand why Aristotle maintained that there are a total of 55 Unmoved Movers, not just one. The key is Aristotelian astronomy, little studied so far in comparison with other aspects of his thought. In this solid piece of research and free philosophical speculation that Botteri & Casazza offer us, the authors’ gaze raised to the sky—by means of the naked-eye analysis of celestial movements—leads to the reconstruction of Aristotle’s astronomical system, key to understanding his cosmology, his physics, and even his metaphysics.

This book is a revised English translation from the original Spanish publication El sistema astronómico de Aristoteles: Una interpretación, published by Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, 2015.