Workshop 'Ancient Pseudepigraphy and the Anchors of Philosophical Innovation' - Day 2

Program

14:10
Welcome to day 2

14:15 – 15:00
Bob van Velthoven (Universiteit Leiden)
Philosophical Innovation with Plato’s Socrates as anchor in the pseudo-Platonic Hipparchus

15:15 – 16:00
Giovanni Trovato (Università di Pisa)
Ocellus of Lucania and the eternity of the universe

16:15 – 17:00 Keynote II
Angela Ulacco (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
The origin of Platonic hylomorphism: Ps.-Timaeus Locrus and the appropriation of Aristotle for the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition

Abstracts

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Philosophical Innovation with Plato’s Socrates as anchor in the pseudo-Platonic Hipparchus

Bob van Velthoven (Universiteit Leiden)

The authenticity of the short Socratic dialogue Hipparchus has been the topic of scholarly debate for the past centuries. Although the authorship of Plato was virtually uncontested in Antiquity, Schleiermacher (1855) has argued quite convincingly on the basis of its outlook and content, such as the positive valuation of φιλοκερδία, that the work was not Plato’s own. Stylometric research (e.g. Ledger 1989) however has not produced any evidence for its inauthenticity. In recent years more scholars (e.g. Davis 2006; Samad 2010) have considered Plato as the author of the work.

The question of authorship is not productive for our understanding of the text. It would be more fruitful, as I will propose in this paper, to regard the Hipparchus as a successful example of anchoring innovation (Sluiter 2017). Not only did the author succeed in his imitation to such extent that later generations genuinely believed his work was Platonic, but he was also able to make some argumentative innovations of his own. The author’s treatment of φιλοκερδία, which partly causes the suspicion with which the dialogue is regarded, builds on Plato’s own negative attitude towards greed, but the author drives the argument farther than Plato himself does in other dialogues.

His close-to-Platonic version of Socrates is the reason he can successfully do this. In this paper, I will examine how the Socrates’ argumentation on the subject of φιλοκερδία resembles those of Plato’s Socrates in Gorgias, especially in his positive redefinition of non-philosophical subjects in philosophic terms. This transformation of φιλοκερδία into a proper philosophical subject, as I will show, may have repositioned Plato in debates on anthropology and economic activity as reflected in Xenophon’s Socratic works. In doing so, I will expand and elaborate on a suggestion made by Schubert (2013).

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Ocellus of Lucania and the eternity of the universe

Giovanni Trovato (Università di Pisa)

My contribution focuses on the treatise De universi natura attributed to Ocellus Lucanus, one of the names mentioned by Iamblichus’ catalogue of Pythagoreans. The tract has as its main topic the eternity of the universe and mankind, and for this reason Ocellus is mentioned by Varro and Philo of Alexandria as a forerunner of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the cosmos. In spite of the author’s attempt to mask the forgery behind Ocellus’ name and an artificial Doric dialect, the Peripatetic arguments the tract shares with ps.-Aristotle’s De mundo and Philo’s De aeternitate mundi reveals that the text is actually a late hellenistic forgery. I intend to focus on the role played by the treatise in the establishment of a sempiternalistic reading of Plato’s cosmogony: I aim to show that the epistular exchange between Archytas and Plato preserved by Diogenes in Lives VIII.80-1, a much disregarded document, is meant to establish a link between Plato and the Pythagorean tradition through the reference to Ocellus’ text, highly regarded by both philosophers. This attempt is all the more significant in as much as Ocellus heavily employs Aristotelian doctrines: the paragraphs 20-35 reproduce, with puzzling modification, Aristotle’s own theory of elemental transformation from De generatione et corruptione II 1-5, but scattered similarities with De caelo, De generatione II.10 and Meteorologica I.4 can be traced all across the treatise. The author, I argue, is at least superficially acquainted with the exoteric treatises and employs them to build a connection between Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, a picture offered by the Anonymus Photii too. Aristotle’s own doctrines were actually developed by the Pythagoreans and as such they belong to Plato too. In doing so, our author attempts to defuse the more common temporalist reading of the Timaeus, rejecting the difficulties associated with demiurgy in favour of an everlasting ungenerated cosmos. Ocellus share this position with Timaeus of Locri, Aristaeus and ps-Philolaus’ fr. 21: our treatise, I argue, is meant to be part of a bigger mosaic, meaning to provide Plato with a clear Pythagorean background, appealing to Pythagoras’ authority in rebuilding an up-to-date dogmatic account after almost two centuries of Academic skepticism.

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The origin of Platonic hylomorphism: Ps.-Timaeus Locrus and the appropriation of Aristotle for the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition

Angela Ulacco (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

The treatise On the nature of the world and the soul, attributed to Timaeus of Locri, is mostly neglected in surveys of the ancient reception of Plato’s Timaeus. It is the product, however, of a close reading of Plato’s text and constitutes an early interpretation of it. It is the only treatise in the apocryphal Pythagorean corpus that, while implicitly presenting itself as the ‘Urtext’ of Plato’s Timaeus, is in fact an interpretative summary of that dialogue. By taking a stance in exegetical debates and at the same time presenting his interpretation as the original version of Plato’s text, its author could hope to influence the future understanding of Plato’s text.

Timaeus Locrus interestingly combines features of Old Academic and Hellenistic theories and appropriates Aristotle’s most significant achievements, thereby opening compelling new philosophical perspectives. The way in which Plato’s Timaeus is summarised offers significant clues as to how Plato’s work was received between the Hellenistic and the Post Hellenistic age, a crucial phase in the history of Platonism. Also, the text constitutes evidence of an early active engagement with Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s. On several passages it is possible to detect a selective engagement with Aristotle’s esoteric works, most conspicuously De Caelo, Metaphysics 1, but also some passages from the Physics and Meteorology 4.

In this contribution I would like to analyze some of Timaeus Locrus’ strategies, the theoretical difficulties that these imply and how Timaeus Locrus attempts to resolve them by looking at a specific issue: hylomorphism. Timaeus Locrus develops a version of Plato’s geometric atomism that has theoretically interesting features, since it tries to combine Plato’s doctrine with an Aristotelian-type hylomorphism. Timaeus Locrus moreover integrates hylomorphism with the Pythagorean theory of principles, whereby matter and form were considered as belonging to the two legs of a twofold parallel series. According to this theory, an interaction of limit with a principle of unlimitedness can be observed on all levels of reality (even in the cosmic soul). Form and matter are what these two principles are called in their physical manifestations. Even if it is not possible to say to what extent Timaeus Locrus (or his source) was aware of this strategy, the integration of this new hylomorphism into the account of the Timaeus has the advantage that it disarms some of Aristotle’s most damaging criticisms against Plato. This approach fits with other apocryphal Pythagorean texts which probably originated from a need to offer a specific interpretation of the Platonic dialogues. I will suggest that Timaeus Locrus, like other apocryphal Pythagorean texts, contributed to create a new ‘Pythagorean’ authority. They provide confirmation of the idea that it is possible to integrate Aristotle’s philosophy into Plato’s, since they both have their origin in the ancient Pythagoreanism.