Severos

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Severos ( Greek  Σεουῆρος or Σεβῆρος or Σευῆρος) was an ancient philosopher . He belonged to the direction of Middle Platonism . Presumably he lived in the 2nd or early 3rd century.

Life and works

No certain details are known about Severos' life. A clue for the dating arises from the fact that his writings were already available around the middle of the 3rd century.

Patrice Hanson Cauderlier and Klaas Anthony Worp suggested identifying Severos with a Platonist named in an inscription from the area of Antinoopolis in Middle Egypt. Of the presumed name Severos, however, only the beginning ("Se") is preserved in the inscription. The addition is therefore hypothetical, but it has received cautious approval in research. If the identification is correct, his full name is Flavius ​​Maecius Severus Dionysodorus in Latin and Flavios Maikios Severos Dionysodoros in Greek. In this case he was a Roman citizen, came from Antinoopolis or had acquired the citizenship there and was a member of the city council. According to the inscription, he was one of the scholars who worked at the Museion of Alexandria .

Only fragments of Severus' works have survived. Two writings are mentioned by later authors: a commentary on Plato's dialogue Timaeus and a treatise “On the Soul”.

Teaching

Severos belonged to a current in Middle Platonism which was critical of Aristotle's theory of categories . One of the problems with which he was concerned was the question of the applicability of the Aristotelian system of categories to the intelligible world, which Platonism viewed as an independent reality . Taking up a stoic thought, he adopted ti ("something") as the highest, most general genus ; Both the intelligible (only spiritually comprehensible) and the sensually perceptible things belong to this genus, so it includes everything. The two areas of beings and of becoming are subordinate to it. This model shows Severos' tendency towards monism .

He took a mediating position on the controversial question of whether the world exists forever or whether it was created in the sense of a temporal beginning. In a sense, he professed to accept a creation in time. With this he turned against the interpreters of Plato's Timaeus , who said that the creation of the world described there is not to be understood in the sense of a production at a certain point in time, but the "creation" of the world is a continuous process without beginning and end and the formulations in Timaeus' account of creation should be understood metaphorically in this sense . Severos tried to unite the two opposing concepts of eternity and origin by teaching that the cosmos in itself is eternal, but that the now existing world order with its movements had arisen. For this cosmology he relied on a passage in Plato's Dialog Politikos , which speaks of alternating world periods. His model is often compared in research with that of the Stoics , who taught an eternal cycle of the creation and the end of the world, but Severos does not seem to have thought of periodical endings of the world. He believed that the continued existence of the world depends on the will of its Creator holding it together, because by its own nature it is subject to dissolution.

In the theory of the soul, Severos was of the opinion that the world soul represents a unit. The formation of the world soul described in Timaeus through the mixture of two opposing components, one divided and one undivided, could not be viewed in the context of his homogeneity model as a combination of two essentially different elements. Therefore he interpreted Plato's statements geometrically. In the world soul there is an indivisible aspect, the point, and a divisible aspect, the distance ( diástēma ), that is, the extension. In this understanding, the world soul thus became a geometrical fact. As part of his Timaeus interpretation, Severos also dealt with questions of music theory ( harmony ) and its connection with the theory of the soul, with which he turned to a Pythagorean theme.

He also considered individual human souls to be homogeneous. In terms of this concept, he did not ascribe to them two different abilities, the power of thought ( nóēsis ) to grasp the intelligible world and the ability to perceive ( aísthēsis ) to grasp the sensory objects, but a single power of judgment, the logos . He regarded the powers of thought and the lower powers of knowledge as organs of the Logos.

With these ideas, Severos turned against the dualistic conception of the soul, which followed Plato's wording , and which is based on a mixture of different soul elements, namely irrational parts that are affected and a reasonable part that is not subject to suffering. On the other hand, he argued that a heterogeneous soul could not be immortal, for its constituent parts would by nature be forced to strive in different directions and thereby separate, just as the light strives upwards and the heaviness downwards. Hence such a soul would have to dissolve. The soul, however, is not a third made up of two opposing components, the properties of which result from this combination, but rather its essence corresponds to its own simple, incorporeal and unhappy nature. With his formulations, Plato had to take into account a widespread conception of the soul that he did not share.

reception

Severos was criticized by peripatetics for his cosmology. In the school of Plotinus , the founder of Neoplatonism , his commentary on Plato was part of the curriculum around the middle of the 3rd century.

The philosophy of Severus met with rejection among the late ancient Neo-Platonists. Syrianos accused him of using mathematical ideas inappropriately to explain natural conditions, by which he probably meant the geometric interpretation of the composition of the soul. Proclus rejected his theory of the soul as well as his conception of the origin of the world and his position on the system of categories.

The church writer Eusebios of Caesarea quoted a longer passage from Severus' treatise on the soul in his work Praeparatio evangelica .

Source collections

  • Heinrich Dörrie , Matthias Baltes (ed.): Platonism in antiquity . Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1987 ff. (Source texts with translation and commentary)
  • Adriano Gioè (Ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti . Bibliopolis, Napoli 2002, ISBN 88-7088-430-9 , pp. 377-433 (source texts with Italian translation and commentary)
  • Marie-Luise Lakmann (Ed.): Platonici minores. 1st century BC - 2nd century AD. Prosopography, fragments and testimony with German translation (= Philosophia antiqua , volume 145). Brill, Leiden / Boston 2017, ISBN 978-90-04-31533-4 , pp. 230-236, 684-699

literature

  • Patrice Hanson Cauderlier, Klaas Anthony Worp: SB III 6012 = IBM IV 1076: Unrecognized evidence for a Mysterious Philosopher . In: Aegyptus. Rivista italiana di egittologia e papirologia. Volume 62, 1982, pp. 72–79
  • John Dillon : The Middle Platonists . Duckworth, London 1977, ISBN 0-7156-1091-0 , pp. 262-264
  • Franco Ferrari: Severos. In: Christoph Riedweg et al. (Hrsg.): Philosophy of the imperial era and late antiquity (= outline of the history of philosophy . The philosophy of antiquity. Volume 5/1). Schwabe, Basel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7965-3698-4 , pp. 584-587, 687
  • Richard Goulet: Severus. In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques. Volume 6, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2016, ISBN 978-2-271-08989-2 , pp. 236–241

Remarks

  1. ^ André Bernand: Les Portes du désert. Recueil des inscriptions grecques d'Antinooupolis, Tentyris, Koptos, Apollonopolis Parva et Apollonopolis Magna . Paris 1984, no.14 .
  2. ^ Adriano Gioè (ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti , Napoli 2002, p. 395.
  3. ↑ Patrice Hanson Cauderlier, Klaas Anthony Worp: SB III 6012 = IBM IV 1076: Unrecognized evidence for a Mysterious Philosopher . In: Aegyptus. Rivista italiana di egittologia e papirologia 62, 1982, pp. 72-79, here: 77-79; Text of the inscription with Italian translation by Adriano Gioè (Ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti , Napoli 2002, p. 379.
  4. ↑ Proklos, In Platonis Timaeum I 227: 13-18; see Heinrich Dörrie, Matthias Baltes: Platonism in antiquity. Vol. 4, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1996, pp. 66 f., 288 f.
  5. ↑ For the meaning and the philosophical-historical classification of the model see Adriano Gioè: Severo, il medioplatonismo e le categorie . In: Elenchos 14, 1993, pp. 33-53.
  6. ↑ Proklos, In Platonis Timaeum I 289,6−13; see Heinrich Dörrie, Matthias Baltes: Platonism in antiquity. Vol. 5, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1998, pp. 118 f., 419-421 and John Dillon: The Middle Platonists , London 1977, p. 263.
  7. ^ Adriano Gioè (ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti , Napoli 2002, pp. 406-412 with a discussion of the research opinions.
  8. ↑ On Severos' theory of the soul, see Werner Deuse : Investigations on the Middle Platonic and Neo-Platonic theory of the soul. Wiesbaden 1983, pp. 102-108.
  9. ^ Adriano Gioè (ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti , Napoli 2002, pp. 387-390, 422-425.
  10. ↑ Proklos, In Platonis Timaeum I 255,3−9; Text and discussion by Adriano Gioè (ed.): Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C. Testimonianze e frammenti , Napoli 2002, pp. 385, 419-422; see. John Dillon: The Middle Platonists , London 1977, p. 262 f.
  11. ^ Porphyrios , Vita Plotini 14.
personal data
SURNAME Severos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Σευῆρος (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION ancient philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1st century or 2nd century
DATE OF DEATH 2nd century or 3rd century