Podcast episode

September 11, 2024

Episode 193: All from Nothing: Sara Rappe on Damascius

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We are delighted to speak with Sara Rappe about the great Damascius, final scholarch of Athenian Platonism. While we do our usual basic due diligence at the beginning of the episode, much of our discussion centres around the question of what Damascius’ goals as a writer of philosophy were. There is a thoroughgoing apophatic dismantlement of Proclus’ higher metaphysics, particularly in the first section of the Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles; Rappe reads this as a call to embracing aporia as an aspect of lived philosophy meant to take the philosopher outside the strictures of conceptual thought and belief. She’s not wrong.

Interview Bio:

Sara Rappe is Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. She has published widely and innovatively on ancient Platonism and related subjects; her works include the wonderful Reading Neoplatonism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000) and a translation of Damascius’ Problems and Solutions Regarding First Principles (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010).

Works Cited in this Episode:

Primary:

Agathias on the ‘pilgrimage’ from the Academy to the court of Khusrau: Histories II.30.3-4 Frendo: ‘Not long before Damascius of Syria, Simplicius of Cilicia, Eulamius of Phrygia, Priscian of Lydia, Hermes and Diogenes of Phoenicia and Isidore of Gaza, all of them, to use a poetic turn of phrase, the quintessential flower of the philosophers of our age, had come to the conclusion, since the official religion of the Roman empire was not to their liking, that the Persian state was much superior. So they gave a ready hearing to the stories in general circulation according to which Persia was the land of “Plato’s philosopher king” in which justice reigned supreme …. 4 Elated therefore by these reports which they accepted as true, and also because they were forbidden by law to take part in public life with impunity owing to the fact that they did not conform to the established religion, they left immediately and set off for a strange land whose ways were completely foreign to their own, determined to make their homes there.’

Damascius:

  • ‘Philosophy’s brittle old age’: Damascius Philosophical History 150a Athanassiadi.
  • On the ‘hieratic’ type of philosopher: Damascius Philosophical History 4a-c Athanassiadi  = fr. 3 Zintzen = Suda II 613, 14 and IV 267, 18 (s.v. ἱερατική and Πυθαγόρας).

Secondary:

For the statues concealed in the well in ‘House C’ on the Areopagos, see Alison Franz. The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Late Antiquity: A.D. 267-700. Vol. XXIV. Princeton American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton, NJ, 1988, pp. 44, 87-88. P. 88: ‘… all the sculpture was evidently a collection made by a lover of classical art. None of this is ordinary debris such as is commonly found in wells. All was in an excellent state of preservation and was obviously placed in the wells for purposes of concealment. Consideration of the time and the condition of the sculpture leads to the conclusion that the two events,the action of Justinian and the concealment of the sculpture,are closely related.The occupants either left Athens or disappeared from sight, while still keeping the hope that their fortunes would be reversed and that they would return to their old surroundings.’

The difficult-to-use edition of the fragments of Damascius’ Life of Isidore: Clemens Zintzen, editor. Damascii vitæ Isidori reliquiæ. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, 1967.

Polymnia Athanassiadi. Damascius: The Philosophical History. Text with Translation. Apameia, Athens, 1999.

Jonathan Greig. The First Principle in Late Neoplatonism: A Study of the One’s Causality in Proclus and Damascius. Brill, Leiden/Boston, MA, 2021.

For Vlad and Métry-Tresson, see Recommended Reading.

The two books on Damascius’ philosophy of time: Pantelis Golitsis. Damascius’ Philosophy of Time. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, MA, 2023; the other book referred to isn’t actually on Damascius, but is rather a study of Plotty: Gheorghe Paşcalău. Zeit und Ewigkeit. In Christian Tornau, editor, Plotin Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, pages 43142. J.B. Metzler, 2024.

Recommended Reading:

The De Wulf – Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy maintains a great online bibliography of important primary texts and studies of Damascius. It’s a great first stop. We have put together a selected bibliography, found below, which focuses on the topics discussed in the episode.

SHWEP Damascius Recommended Reading

A chart of the Athenian and Alexandrian schools in late antiquity.

 

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