Aktuelles
12.05.2023
Conference: Porphyry's Psychology in Contest
12 & 13 May 2023 | International Conference | Evangelisches Stift Tübingen
Platonism and Christianity are understood in the context of our project as “orders” synchronously present in the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity, which perceived one another as mutually threatening.
We are investigating how their perception of the threat affects their respective acts of “threat-communication” and the re-establishment, or re-ordering, of their own order in connection with this communication. Our project concentrates on two exceptional actors from these two orders, namely, the Platonist Porphyry and the Christian theologian Eusebius. They were both active at a time when it was still unclear which of the orders would socially and structurally prevail, viz. in the time of the so-called Constantinian shift. Especially important to highlight is the fact that a number of Porphyry’s texts are extant merely as quotations in the writings of Eusebius and thus embedded in his own Christian “threat-communication”.
The perspective of actors is particularly relevant for the determination of the synchronous interdependence, because the literary strategies of both intellectuals are themselves to be understood as actions. Both authors carry on their literary activity a) in the context of and with reference to the framework of the Imperium Romanum as well as b) within a broadly-conceptualized understanding of philosophy and/or theology as an all-encompassing order for one’s world, knowledge, and life. It provides an ethical orientation and normative presuppositions. In Platonism and Christianity, we do not have before us two purely abstract orders focused merely on hypothetical postulates, but orders trying to orient action – in light of a particular vision for life and ethics – through literary production.
More concretely we are investigating the engagement of Eusebius with the praxeological ethical system of Porphyry, which – on the basis of his Platonic, i.e., Plotinian doctrine of the soul – offers an ascetic model for life especially through vegetarianism. Though it is certainly motivated by transcendent elements, yet it must also be understood as a profoundly this-world “approach to the divine.” We thus lay special focus on the doctrine of the soul and its consequences for the practice of sacrifice, because here changing borders become visible amid new attempts to set up boundaries between Platonism and Christianity (understood as a means of inclusion and exclusion).
Download: Conference Programme
Organisation & Registration
Prof. Dr. Irmgard Männlein-Robert
University of Tübingen
Faculty of Humanities – Department of Classics
irmgard.maennlein-robert@uni-tuebingen.de
Prof. Dr. Volker Drecoll
Universität Tübingen
Faculty of Protestant Theology – Church History II
volker.drecoll@uni-tuebingen.de
Dr. Sonsoles Costero Quiroga
University of Tübingen
CRC 923 "Threatened Order: Societies under Stress"
sonsoles.costero-quiroga@uni-tuebingen.de
Joshua Shaw
University of Tübingen
CRC 923 "Threatened Order: Societies under Stress"
joshaw94@gmail.com
Project G01: Platonism and Christianity in Late Antiquity: Literary strategies of threat communication in Porphyry and Eusebius (https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/160246)
Contact
Thorsten Zachary
University of Tübingen
CRC 923 "Threatened Order: Societies under Stress"
Public Relations & Science Communication
+49 7071 29-75095
thorsten.zachary@uni-tuebingen.de