Studies in Later Greek Philosophy and Gnosticism

Jaap Mansfeld

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2024
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040237700
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

It is a curious fact that many of the sources for the Presocratic and Stoic philosophers are early Christian authors; similarly, one can even find an echo of Parmenides in a Gnostic treatise from Nag Hammadi. Such writers were often dependent for their knowledge on a whole chain of previous interpretations and traditions, and it is these with which Professor Mansfeld is here largely concerned. He has tried to discover what in an earlier writer - Plato, and Aristotle, of course, as well as the Early Greeks - was of interest to a later one, notably the Middle Platonists. These articles demonstrate the value of such an approach, showing how a familiarity with the later history of an idea, say in a Gnostic text, can contribute to the understanding of the idea itself; or how the study of the selection of ideas used by Philo, for instance, not only sheds light on his own projects, but also helps explain why some motifs survived and not others, and why philosophical thought took the directions it did.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I: Providence and the Destruction of the Universe in Barly Stoic Thought
• Chapter II: Resurrection Added: The interpretatio christiana of a Stoic Doctrine
• Chapter III: Techne: A New Fragment of Chrysippus
• Chapter IV: The Cleanthes Fragment in Cicero, De Natura Deorum II 24
• Chapter V: Sorne Stoics on the Soul (SVF I 136)
• Chapter VI: Three Notes on Albinus
• Chapter VII: Heraclitus, Empedocles and Others in a Middle Platonist Cento in Philo of Alexandria
• Chapter VIII: Heraclitus fr. B 63 D.-K.
• Chapter IX: On Two Fragments of Heraclitus in Clement of Alexandria
• Chapter X: Philosophy in the Service of Scripture: Philo's Exegetical Strategies
• Chapter XI: Review of: D. O'Brien, Pour interpréter Empédocle
• Chapter XII: Review of: P. Mastandrea, Un Neoplatonico Latino: Cornelio Labeone
• Chapter XIII: Alexander and the History of Neoplatonism
• Chapter XIV: Bad World and Demiurge: A 'Gnostic' Motif from Parmenides and Empedocles to Lucretius and Philo
• Chapter XV: Review of: L.J. Alderink, Creation and Salvation in Ancient Orphism
• Chapter XVI: Review of: D. Pesce, La Tavola di Cebete, and of J.T. Fitzgerald & J.M. White, The Tabula of Cebes
• Chapter XVII: Hesiod and Parmenides in Nag Hammadi
• Addenda et Corrigenda
• Index