Damascius

Damascius ( Greek  Δαμάσκιος ; * to 462 in Damascus ; † after 538 ) was a late antique philosopher of Neoplatonic direction. After years of study in Alexandria , he entered the Neoplatonic school in Athens and eventually became its last director. As a staunch supporter of the ancient Greek religion, he was in opposition to the Christian state religion of the Eastern Roman Empire . After the religious conflict had led to the closure of the philosophy school, Damascius temporarily emigrated with other Neoplatonists to the Persian Empire .

Life

The hometown of Damascus was Damascus, where he was probably born in the early sixties of the 5th century. Apparently, like most of the neo-platonists of late antiquity, he came from a respected family. Around 479 he went to Alexandria to study rhetoric , where he was a student of a rhetoric teacher named Theon for three years, probably a descendant of the wife of the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry . In Alexandria he frequented the circle of the Platonic oriented pagan philosophers and their families and studied Platonic philosophy and astronomy with Ammonios Hermeiou . The followers of the old religion, to which he belonged, were then exposed to persecution by the Christian authorities in Alexandria; Damascios' younger brother Julian was tortured as part of such a police operation.

Around 482 Damascius went to Athens, where he initially taught rhetoric for nine years and at the same time joined the local Neoplatonic school, which continued the tradition of the Platonic Academy . This school was still run by Proclus until 485 , whose successor was Marinos of Neapolis . With Marinos, Damascius studied the propaedeutic sciences that served as preparation for philosophy , especially geometry and arithmetic. However, he did not have a high opinion of the Marino's abilities. His philosophy teachers were two students of Proclus, Zenodotus and Isidore . He was friends with Isidore, whom he greatly admired.

In 515 at the latest, Damascius became the last head of the Neoplatonic school. His most important student was Simplikios . After Emperor Justinian I had banned pagan teaching in 529, the school was closed. Perhaps as early as 531, or at the latest 532, Damascius and Simplikios emigrated to the Persian Sasanid Empire with five other Neoplatonists . There they found admission to the court of Great King Chosrau I, who had ruled since 531 . However, they soon saw their hopes disappointed and decided, although Chosrau would have liked to keep them at his court, to return to the Eastern Roman Empire. In the fall of 532, a peace was made between the Sassanids and the Eastern Romans, and in one of the clauses of the treaty the great king insisted that the philosophers should return home and remain undisturbed by their religious beliefs for the rest of their lives. Where Damascius and the other philosophers then settled is unknown; According to an appealing but controversial hypothesis by Michel Tardieu, they lived in Carrhae (in present-day Turkey) on their return . What is certain is that Damascius was in Syria in 538; later it no longer appears in the sources.

Works

Damaskios' works are partly almost completely preserved, partly only passed on in the form of lecture transcripts, partly lost and only known from mentions in his surviving writings or from other authors. Two works are almost completely preserved: the treatise On the First Principles ( Peri tōn prōtōn archōn , Latin De principiis ) and the commentary on Plato's dialogue Parmenides . In older research, the view was taken that they were two parts of a single work, since both deal with the Parmenides theme. But today it is assumed that there are two separate works.

Commentaries on two further dialogues of Plato: on Phaedo and on Philebos have only survived as transcripts or collections of notes from listeners . Another work, the biography of Damascius' teacher and friend Isidore, written between 517 and 526, is only preserved in fragments that have come down to us in the library of the Byzantine scholar Photios and in the Suda . Damascius himself describes this work as a biography, but it goes beyond the scope of a mere description of Isidore's life, since it offers a broad account of the history of the Neoplatonic school in Athens since the end of the fourth century; therefore the title Philosophical History ( Philósophos historía ) given in the Suda seems more appropriate. Damascius describes prominent philosophers in it, whereby he also exercises plenty of criticism, and polemicises against the Christians.

Lost commentaries on Plato's Timaeus and the First Alcibiades , in which Damascius opposed the views of Proclus who commented on these dialogues , are known only from a few mentions . A treatise on the number, the place and the time in which he dealt with Aristotle's physics and a treatise on the first book of Aristotle's Meteorologica are also preserved only in fragments . The lost writings also include a collection of miracle stories ( Parádoxa ) in four books, which among other things contained numerous stories about demons and apparitions of souls of the dead as well as extraordinary natural phenomena, a funerary oration in verse to Aidesia, the wife of the philosopher Hermeias of Alexandria , and Comments on works by rhetoricians.

Teaching and reception

Damascius dealt thoroughly with Plato's interpretation of Proclus, from whose doctrine he turned away; his understanding of Platonism grew out of the constant examination of the views of Proclus. He returned to the philosophy of Iamblichus . His aim was to restore the original teaching of Iamblichus and to purge it of the changes that Syrianos and especially Proclus had introduced. Of the two means of redemption of the Neoplatonists, philosophical knowledge and theurgy , Damascius preferred philosophy, but also considered theurgy to be important. With reference to Plato, he advocated a connection between the two, in which he saw the task of a Platonic philosopher.

Damascius continued the refinement of the classification of the transcendent characteristic of late Neoplatonism, whereby he went beyond Proclus in the differentiation of the conceptual determinations. At the same time, his philosophy was also characterized by an agnostic trait, because he saw in these subdivisions more aids to thinking, which the human mind needs, than objectively valid statements about the non-sensually perceptible world. He emphasized the transcendence of the absolute so strongly that he did not even want to equate it with the one , but only spoke of the "unspeakable" about which only negative statements make sense. That is why he did not even regard the inexpressible, which he placed above the relatively expressible one, as a principle in the actual sense. As a result, all statements about the relationship of the absolute to reality accessible to us were given a principally provisional character for him.

In his analysis of the problem of the temporal continuum, Damascius started from the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea . He saw the solution in the assumption that time has a discontinuous structure and consists of non-divisible quanta. In his view, the flow of time is made up of a series of tiny jumps which represent finite quantities and of which one immediately follows the other. The now is therefore not point-like for him. The size of the time quanta is not constant; it increases with the speed of a moving body, but is always greater than zero even when it is at rest. Damascios assumed a "total time" ( sýmpas chrónos ), a simultaneously existing reality of all time as the basis of the quantized time we perceive as a continuum. According to this, only humans divide time into past, present and future because - in contrast to their simultaneous perception of space - they are unable to perceive the simultaneous character of the total time.

In the Byzantine Empire , Damascius' main philosophical works were almost unknown. In modern times, the late Schelling tied to his emphasis on the transcendence of the absolute.

Text output (partly with translation)

• Leendert G. Westerink , Joseph Combès (ed.): Damascius: Commentaire du Parménide de Platon . 4 volumes, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1997–2003 (critical edition with French translation)
• Leendert G. Westerink (Ed.): The Greek Commentaries on Plato's Phaedo , Vol. 2: Damascius . North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam 1977, ISBN 0-7204-8331-X (critical edition with English translation)
• Gerd Van Riel (Ed.): Damascius: Commentaire sur le Philèbe de Platon . Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-251-00546-1 (critical edition with French translation)
• Leendert G. Westerink, Joseph Combès (ed.): Damascius: Traité des premiers principes . 3 volumes, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1986–1991 (critical edition with French translation)
• Polymnia Athanassiadi (ed.): Damascius: The Philosophical History . Apamea Cultural Association, Athens 1999, ISBN 960-85325-2-3 (critical edition of the excerpts and fragments of Isidore's biography with English translation)
• Clemens Zintzen (Ed.): Damascii vitae Isidori reliquiae . Olms, Hildesheim 1967 (first critical edition of the excerpts and fragments of the Isidore biography)

Translations

• Sara Ahbel-Rappe: Damascius' Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-515029-2 (critical review by Michael Chase in The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 6, 2012, pp. 139–145)
• Rudolf Asmus: The life of the philosopher Isidoros of Damascius from Damascus . Meiner, Leipzig 1911 (German translation of the excerpts and fragments of Isidore's biography)
• Marie-Claire Galpérine: Damascius: Des premiers principes. Apories et résolutions. Texts intégral . Verdier, Lagrasse 1987, ISBN 2-86432-055-X

literature

Overview representations

• Damian Caluori: Damascios. In: Christoph Riedweg et al. (Ed.): Philosophy of the Imperial Era and Late Antiquity (= Outline of the history of philosophy . The philosophy of antiquity. Volume 5/3). Schwabe, Basel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7965-3700-4 , pp. 1987–2002, 2155–2159
• Philippe Hoffmann: Damascius . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Vol. 2, CNRS Editions, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-271-05195-9 , pp. 541-593
• John Robert Martindale: Damascius 2 . In: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire , Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980, pp. 342 f.
• Elżbieta Szabat: Damascius . In: Paweł Janiszewski, Krystyna Stebnicka, Elżbieta Szabat: Prosopography of Greek Rhetors and Sophists of the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871340-1 , pp. 81-83
• Gerd Van Riel: Damascius. In: Lloyd P. Gerson (Ed.): The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-19484-6 , pp. 667-696, 1130-1134

Investigations

• Polymnia Athanassiadi: Persecution and response in late paganism: the evidence of Damascius . In: Journal of Hellenic Studies 113, 1993, pp. 1-29
• Dirk Cürsgen: Henology and Ontology. The metaphysical doctrine of principles of late Neoplatonism. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3616-3 , pp. 315–458
• Udo Hartmann : Spirit in Exile. Roman philosophers at the court of the Sasanids . In: Monika Schuol u. a. (Ed.): Crossing borders. Forms of contact between Orient and Occident in antiquity . Steiner, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 123-160
• Udo Hartmann: The late antique philosopher. The lifeworlds of the pagan scholars and their hagiographic design in the philosophers' lives from Porphyrios to Damascios (= Antiquitas , series 1, volume 72). 3 volumes. Habelt, Bonn 2018, ISBN 978-3-7749-4172-4
• Sara Rappe: Skepticism in the sixth century? Damascius 'Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles' . In: Journal of the History of Philosophy 36, 1998, pp. 337-363

essay

• Marco S. Torini: Damascius or From the howling north wind of necessity . In: Gerald Hartung and Wolf Peter Klein (eds.): Between foolishness and wisdom. Biographical sketches and outlines of ancient learning . Olms, Hildesheim 1997, ISBN 3-487-10282-X , pp. 61-94

Web links

• Literature by and about Damascius in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bibliography ( Memento of January 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
• Excerpt from Damascius' Life of Isidore (English)

Remarks

1. ↑ For the dating see Philippe Hoffmann: Damascius . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Vol. 2, Paris 1994, pp. 541-593, here: 542 f.
2. ↑ For the dating see Udo Hartmann: Geist im Exil. Roman philosophers at the court of the Sasanids . In: Monika Schuol et al. (Ed.): Border crossing. Forms of contact between Orient and Occident in antiquity , Stuttgart 2002, pp. 123–160, here: 135–138; Ilsetraut Hadot: Dans quel lieu le neoplatonicien Simplicius at-il fondé son école de mathématiques, et où a pu avoir lieu son entretien avec un manichéen? In: The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 1, 2007, pp. 42-107, here: 44-49.
3. ↑ An overview of the older research discussion is provided by Philippe Hoffmann: Damascius . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Vol. 2, Paris 1994, pp. 541-593, here: 562 f. Tardieu's hypothesis is endorsed by Polymnia Athanassiadi: Persecution and response in late paganism: the evidence of Damascius . In: Journal of Hellenic Studies 113, 1993, pp. 1–29, here: 24–29 and Ilsetraut Hadot (ed.): Simplicius: Commentaire sur le Manuel d'Épictète , Leiden 1996, pp. 24–50; see also Ilsetraut Hadot (ed.): Simplicius: Commentaire sur le Manuel d'Épictète , Vol. 1, Paris 2001, pp. XI – XXXIII. Cf. Udo Hartmann: Spirit in Exile . In: Monika Schuol u. a. (Ed.): Grenzüberreitungen , Stuttgart 2002, pp. 123–160, here: 138 f. and Edward Watts: Where to Live the Philosophical Life in the Sixth Century? Damascius, Simplicius, and the Return from Persia . In: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45, 2005, pp. 285-315. The hypothesis is rejected by Robin Lane Fox, among others : Harran, the Sabians and the late Platonist "movers" . In: Andrew Smith (Ed.): The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity , Swansea 2005, pp. 231-244.
4. ↑ Suda , keyword Damaskios ( Δαμάσκιος ), Adler number: delta 39 , Suda-Online
5. ↑ Polymnia Athanassiadi (ed.): Damascius: The Philosophical History , Athens 1999, pp. 45-57; Philippe Hoffmann: Damascius . In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Vol. 2, Paris 1994, pp. 541-593, here: 573 f.
6. ↑ Dirk Cürsgen: What is knowledge? The epistemology of Damascius and the conceptual field of γνῶσις between speculation and skepticism . In: Archive for Conceptual History 50, 2008, pp. 75–98, here: 76–81.
7. ^ Samuel Sambursky, Shlomo Pines : The Concept of Time in Late Neoplatonism , Jerusalem 1971, pp. 18-21, 74.