Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 1107061539
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Written by a group of leading scholars, this unique collection of essays investigates the views of both pagan and Christian philosophers on causation and the creation of the cosmos. Structured in two parts, the volume first looks at divine agency and how late antique thinkers, including the Stoics, Plotinus, Porphyry, Simplicius, Philoponus and Gregory of Nyssa, tackled questions such as: is the cosmos eternal? Did it come from nothing or from something pre-existing? How was it caused to come into existence? Is it material or immaterial? The second part looks at questions concerning human agency and responsibility, including the problem of evil and the nature of will, considering thinkers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and Augustine. Highlighting some of the most important and interesting aspects of these philosophical debates, the volume will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of philosophy, classics, theology and ancient history.
Physics that we find the clearest expression of this doctrine. In his discussion of Aristotle’s remarks on formal causes in Physics 2.3 Simplicius begins to address the manner in which nature functions as a cause in biological generation.34 Here we find him advancing the four core theses of Neoplatonic embryology,35 and he places particular emphasis on the potentiality inherent in the seed and the necessity of an external agent to actualise the seed. As he says, ‘everything that comes to be in a
behind Atticus’ objections: the hypothesis that he was not very familiar with Aristotle’s works is plausible. See Moraux 1984: 570–1, 580. The disputed philosophical allegiance of the anti-Stoic philosopher Diogenianus (known through Eusebius) confirms further the analogy between the Epicurean and the Peripatetic views on fate: status quaestionis in Sharples 2010: 234. Unfortunately, the Greek text is far from being clear: see Fazzo and Zonta 1999: 209 n. 36. On this difficult and aporetic Quaestio
the more basic notion, either because creation happens first temporally or because it is prior in a metaphysical sense. From this perspective, understanding creation is the more basic task, on which explanations of intra-cosmic causation will be built afterward. From either perspective, though, causation and creation are closely linked. For example, if God creates the cosmos in a certain way, certain implications will follow about the nature of that cosmos (see Chapter 5), and thus for the
philosophy being conducted in Athens. 71 72 richard sorabji interlocutor who represented the case for Platonism and who supposedly lost to the fictitious Christian Euxitheus. The main subject of the Theophrastus was the human soul and its fate before birth and after death, including resurrection. But it overlapped in one part with the subject of the other two Christian texts, the Christians’ creation of the world from a beginning, as opposed to the Neoplatonists’ eternal creation of the
the reciprocal change of the elements, when a whole body passes through a whole body. Cleanthes, on the other hand, speaks somehow in the following way: once the whole has burnt up, first its centre collapses and, next, the parts contiguous to the centre are completely quenched. And once the whole has been dampened, the last portion of fire, given the resistance of the centre to it, moves away in the opposite direction. And then he says that, when it moves upwards, it grows in size and begins the