Plato Revived: Essays on Ancient Platonism in Honour of Dominic J. O'Meara

440 Pages·2013·2.38 MB·English

by  Filip Karfik (editor), Euree Song (editor)

Plato Revived
Beiträge zur Altertumskunde
Herausgegeben von Michael Erler, Dorothee Gall,
Ludwig Koenen und Clemens Zintzen
Band 317
Plato Revived
Essays on Ancient Platonism
in Honour of Dominic J. O’Meara
Edited by
Filip Karfík and Euree Song
ISBN 978-3-11-032440-2
e-ISBN 978-3-11-032466-2
ISSN 1616-0452
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über
http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Dominic J. O’Meara

Preface
This Festschrift was planned to honour Dominic J. O’Meara on the occasion of his
65th birthday. Born on May 14th, 1948 in Dublin, he is the son of John J. O’Meara,
a great scholar of Eriugena and Augustine, and Odile, a gracious French woman.
He studied at Cambridge, in an age of anxiety in Irish-English relations, followed
by doctoral work in Paris, his mother’s native city, under the supervision of Pierre
Hadot, a longstanding source of inspiration for him. He then moved to the United
States, where he was a junior and visiting fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center
for Byzantine Studies and first Assistant, then Associate Professor at the Catholic
University of America in Washington until 1984. Awarded the Chair of Ancient Phi-
losophy and Metaphysics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, he returned
to Europe and devoted himself for a quarter century to teaching and research
until his retirement in 2009.
Dominic J. O’Meara is one of the pioneering scholars who contributed to the
revival of the study of Late Antiquity, particularly Neoplatonism. The mention
of his name immediately calls to mind his major works: Structures hiérarchiques
dans la pensée de Plotin (1975), Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy
in Late Antiquity (1989), Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (1993), and Pla-
tonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (2003), which all show
his meticulous and thorough mind as well as his fresh and thought-provoking
ingenuity. His numerous articles on ancient and early medieval philosophy have
been collected in two further volumes: The Structure of Being and the Search for
the Good (1989) and Sur les traces de l’Absolu (2013). He is also known as the editor
of the philosophical treatises of Michael Psellos for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana
and as a translator of Plotinus into French and of Syrianus into English. Over the
years he has been one of the editors of the Vestigia series, founded by himself
and Ruedi Imbach and published jointly in Fribourg and Paris, and he is cur-
rently one of the editors of the Écrits de Plotin at the Éditions du Cerf. Not only
is he member of several renowned learned societies, but he has also contributed
a great deal over the years to international gatherings such as those of the Ploti-
nus Colloquium and the Academia Platonica Septima Monasteriensis. Besides the
distinguished reputation he enjoys as a scholar, his extraordinary gentleness and
generosity have attracted many students and scholars to Fribourg and have made
from this small, idyllic city a Hochburg of Neoplatonic studies. As Professor Emer-
itus, he has not become a ‘hermit’ leading an ‘unnoticed life’, but has remained
active at the university as a vigorous researcher and a passionate teacher, while
VIII   Preface
making himself available far beyond the borders of Switzerland: from Helsinki in
the North to Brasilia in the South, from New York in the West to Seoul in the East,
to name just the four main points of the compass.
This volume contains a collection of essays on various forms of revival
of Platonism in ancient philosophy and beyond. It consists of contributions by
experts in the field of Platonic and Neoplatonic studies from twelve countries.
It is intended as a homage to a scholar and teacher who has done so much to
explore this vast and often not easily accessible territory. Particular attention has
been paid to the topics essential to his own research: unity, intellect and beauty,
soul and body, virtue and happiness, as well as the political and religious dimen-
sions of Plato’s legacy. The main sections of the volume highlight these topics.
At the end of the volume, the reader will find a testimony to Dominic O’Meara
as a teacher of philosophy as a way of life and an exhaustive list of his scholarly
works. The title Plato Revived was chosen partly because it happily resonates with
the title Dominic O’Meara’s influential book Pythagoras Revived, but more impor-
tantly in order to indicate the extraordinary capacity of the basic tenets of Platon-
ism for renewal and transformation.
As editors, we wish to express our gratitude to all contributors, who have
joined in the making of this Festschrift with their valuable studies despite the
short time limit we imposed on them. Our heartfelt thanks go to those who have
helped in producing this volume, Marianne Garin, Chad Jorgenson, and Richard
Schorlemmer for their assistance in editing contributions in their respective
native languages. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Fri-
bourg financially supported the typesetting of this volume, executed with great
professional skill by Martin Tresnak. Last, but not least, we are deeply grateful
to Michael Erler for accepting this volume in the prestigious series Beiträge zur
Altertumskunde.
The Editors
Table of Contents

Preface  VII
Unity, Intellect, Beauty
Werner Beierwaltes
Plotins Theorie des Schönen und der Kunst  3
Alexandrine Schniewind
Le statut des objets intelligibles chez Alexandre d’Aphrodise et Plotin  27
Pascal Mueller-Jourdan
« Toute pluralité participe en quelque manière de l’un »
Le premier théorème des Éléments de théologie de Proclus revisité
par le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite  41
Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson
Leibniz, Plato, Plotinus  54
Soul and Body
John Dillon
Shadows on the Soul: Plotinian Approaches to a Solution of the Mind-Body
Problem  73
Filip Karfík
Δημογέροντες
L’image de l’assemblée dans les Ennéades VI, 4 [22], 15  85
Euree Song
Ashamed of Being in the Body? Plotinus versus Porphyry  96
Lenka Karfíková
Das Verhältnis von Seele und ratio in Augustins Abhandlung
De immortalitate animae  117
X   Table of Contents
Happiness and Virtue
László Bene
Ethics and Metaphysics in Plotinus  141
Marie-Luise Lakmann
„…die feine Stimme der Zikaden“
Iunkos, Περὶ γήρως und die platonische Philosophie  162
Suzanne Stern-Gillet
When Virtue Bids Us Abandon Life
(Ennead VI 8 [39] 6, 14–26)  182
Daniela P. Taormina
Porfirio ha scritto un trattato Περὶ τοῦ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν?  199
Christian Tornau
Augustinus und die neuplatonischen Tugendgrade
Versuch einer Interpretation von Augustins Brief 155 an Macedonius  215
Irmgard Männlein-Robert
Platonismus als ‚Philosophie des Glücks‘: Programm, Symbolik und Form
in der Vita Procli des Marinos  241
Platonopolis
Rafael Ferber
Das Paradox von der Philosophenherrschaft im Staat, Staatsmann
und in den Gesetzen
Einige Bemerkungen zur Einheit und Variation des platonischen
Denkens  261
Cinzia Arruzza
Being True to One’s Birth: What is gennaion in the Noble Falsehood
of the Republic?  278