On May 2, D. S. Hutchinson and I will make a keynote presentation to the Canadian Colloquium for Ancient Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. The abstract follows:
An Introduction to Iamblichus' Exhortation to Philosophy
The Exhortation to Philosophy of Iamblichus, composed in Apamea (in ancient Syria) in the early 4th c.
AD, was a new kind of philosophical book, the first ‘textbook’ of
ancient philosophy. Together with the other titles in his Pythagorean
sequence, this book of Iamblichus is the first book of philosophy known
to have been constructed by its author in chapters. It is also the first
known book of philosophy whose sole purpose was to display citations
from past philosophical writings by incorporating them into its own
literary texture and commenting on them. In both respects it resembles a
modern philosophy textbook. It is a difficult but very rewarding work.
In
this talk we present an English translation of this work (nearly
complete work-in-progress of ours), and demonstrate the structure,
texture, capitulation, chapter headings, and literary devices of the
work as a whole, starting with chapter I. Then we show in concrete terms
how texts of Plato were cited, sometimes with alteration, in chapters
XIII-XIX, quickly reviewing the conclusions of our 2005 OSAP article “Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus”. We follow up now and confirm this analysis by studying ch. III, where Iamblichus cites from the Pythagorean Golden Verses.
At this point, we apply this analysis to chapters VI-XII, where the bulk of the evidence lies for Aristotle’s Protrepticus, as we showed in our OSAP article. Then we share our reconstruction-in-progress of the Protrepticus,
showing the relationship between cover text and source text, as well as
showing how we enlarged the evidence base by drawing in evidence from
other chapters in another work of Iamblichus.
Now we return from Aristotle’s work to the Exhortation of
Iamblichus. We briefly discuss the remaining chapters of his book,
glancing at chapter II (gnomic maxims of unknown provenance), chapter IV
(citations from the On Wisdom of Archytas of Tarentum, or ps.-Archytas), and chapter V (citations from Plato and then from a lost work of Aristotle).
We
focus our closing comments on chapter XX, where Iamblichus has stitched
together many citations from an important early author on education and
political philosophy, originally identified in 1889 as Antiphon, but
officially referred to as ‘Anonymous Iamblichi’. Many other attributions
have been made, including the one most plausible to us, Protagoras of
Abdera; but rather than try to solve that old open question, our plan is
to establish a new basis of evidence. With our greater experience of
the voice and literary texture of Iamblichus, we can now see that the
old fragment collection in Diels/Kranz, on the basis of which all
scholarship has proceeded, was not analyzed sufficiently and was
over-inclusive: rather than there being 7 fragments, there are more like
25 fragments, with many intervening comments on the part of Iamblichus
lodged (up to now) within ‘fragments’ of the Anonymous author, a
confusion of data in the evidence base that may have tangled the
scholarly discussion. We have also identified one further citation from
this fascinating author, whose voice and lines of thought deserve to be
better known.