92 - King of Animals: Porphyry | History of Philosophy without any gaps

Posted on 2 September 2012

Porphyry fuses Platonism with Aristotelianism, exploring Aristotle’s logic and Plotinus’ philosophy. He also finds time to argue for vegetarianism.

Themes:

Animals

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Celsus the Platonist

I ran across another late antique philosopher who argued for the rationality of animals: Celsus, who lived about a century before Porphyry, wrote as follows (about ants, of all things):

"And when they meet one another they enter into conversation, for which reason they never mistake their way; consequently they possess a full endowment of reason, and some common ideas on certain general subjects, and a voice by which they express themselves regarding accidental things."

This is from Origen's Contra Celsum 4.84 (online here).

Celsus

Right, thanks - that's a good reference. I actually mention Celsus in another episode, the one on Origen.

Letter to Marcella

Recently I found a translation of Porphyry's "Letter to his Wife Marcella", which I found it to be kind of an odd text. It begins as something resembling a correspondence with someone close, but slowly shifts into almost a philosophical diatribe. I haven't come across many correspondence letters from this era that are preserved and covered in scholarship, are they rare or am I just not aware of them?

Really love the podcast,

-A

Letters

Yes that's an interesting text, I should have done more with it. The philosophical letter is actually a pretty widespread ancient phenomenon, we have a number of them from Iamblichus (these are even translated into English) and off the top of my head one could also think about the letters of Seneca, or Augustine. I think in general most intellectuals in antiquity wrote letters frequently so the real questions are how often they are preserved, and to what extent they were used as opportunities for waxing philosophical.