Philo Judaeus [addendum]
The original entry on Philo Judaeus was written by Harry Wolfson, one of the preeminent scholars of medieval religious philosophy. A major premise of his general work is that Philo's philosophical project stands as the foundation for the religious philosophizing common to the three monotheistic cultures: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Though Philo, a Hellenized Alexandrian Jew of the first century CE, had little impact upon his own people, he had a manifest impact upon the church fathers, and according to Wolfson his "attempt to interpret the scriptural teachings in terms of Greek philosophy" was common philosophical coin until Spinoza, another Jew, in the seventeenth century tore down Philo's harmonizing project.
Philo scholarship was abundant throughout the last few decades of the twentieth century. There originated an annual conference, The Studia Philonica Annual. Much recent work has emphasized the Greek (Alexandrian) milieu that incubated Philo and his philosophy. Philo almost certainly knew no Hebrew and was familiar (only) with the Septuagint version of scripture. Further, his project of teasing out the inherent philosophicality of scripture took the form of allegory—a method adopted from the Stoic method of allegorical exegesis of Homer—that reached final form in the work of Crates of Mallos in the second century BCE. "Armed with Greek allegorical exegesis," writes David Winston, "which seeks out the hidden meanings that lie beneath the surface of any particular text, and given the Middle Platonist and Neo-Pythagorean penchant to read back new doctrines into the works of a venerable figure of the past, Philo was fully prepared to do battle for his ancestral tradition" (1981, p. 6). This passage by Winston describes the tool, and the philosophical prejudices, that motivated Philo to reveal the deepest truths of Scripture. As Maimonides adapted Aristotelian categories for purposes all his own, so Philo is to be understood "as essentially adapting contemporary Alexandrian Platonism, which was itself heavily influenced by Stoicism and Pythagoreanism, to his own exegetical purposes" (Dillon 1977, p. 182). Caught between two cultures, Philo stands as the first monotheistic thinker to find a manifest use for Greek philosophy for explicating his own religious tradition.
Aristotelianism; Homer; Maimonides; Platonism and the Platonic Tradition; Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism; Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) De; Stoicism.
Bibliography
Works by Philo Judaeus
Philo of Alexandria On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses: Translation and Commentary. Translated by David T. Runia. Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 1. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001.
Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, the Giants, and Selections. Translated by David Winston. New York: Paulist Press, 1981.
Works on Philo Judaeus and His Philosophical Background
Chadwick, Henry. "Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought." In The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy," edited by A. H. Armstrong, 135–157. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Dillon, John. The Middle Platonists, 139–183. London: Duckworth, 1977.
Hay, David M., ed. Both Literal and Allegorical: Studies in Philo of Alexandria's Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus. Brown Judaic Series 232. Atlanta: 1991.
Hay, David M. "Philo's References to Other Allegorists." Studia Philonica 6 (1979–80): 41–75.
Hengel, Martin. Judaism and Hellenism. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974.
Mendelson, Alan. Philo's Jewish Identity. Brown Judaic Series 161. Atlanta: 1988.
Nadler, Steven. "Spinoza and Philo: The Alleged Mysticism in the Ethics." In Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, edited by J. Miller and B. Inwood, 232–250. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Runia, David. Exegesis and Scripture: Studies on Philo of Alexandria. Variorum Collected Studies Series. London: 1990.
Runia, David. Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 32. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1995.
Runia, David. Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey. Compendia Rerum ad Novum Testamentum III Vol. 3. Assen-Minneapolis: 1993.
Runia, David. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1937–86. With R. Radice. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 8. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1988. 2nd edition, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1992.
Runia, David. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1987–96. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000.
Runia, David T. Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato. PhD diss. Free University of Amsterdam. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1983. Rev. ed., Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato, Philosophia Antiqua 44. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1986.
Sandmel, Samuel. Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Sterling, Gregory E., ed. The Ancestral Tradition: Hellenistic Philosophy in Second Temple Judaism. Essays of David Winston. Studia Philonica Monographs 4, Brown Judaic Series 331. Providence, RI: 2001.
Winston, David. "Aspects of Philo's Linguistic Theory." The Studia Philonica Annual 3 (1991): 109–125.
Winston, David. "Judaism and Hellenism: Hidden Tensions in Philo's Thought." The Studia Philonica Annual 2 (1990): 1–19.
Winston, David. Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985.
Winston, David. "Philo and the Hellenistic Jewish Encounter." The Studia Philonica Annual 7 (1995): 124–142.
Winston, David. "Philo's Mysticism." The Studia Philonica Annual 8 (1996): 74–82.
Winston, David. "Philo's Nachleben in Judaism." The Studia Philonica Annual 6 (1994): 103–110.
Winston, David. "Plato's Conception of the Divine Nature." In Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, edited by L. E. Goodman, 21–42. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Winston, David, and John Dillon. Two Treatises of Philo of Alexandria: A Commentary on De Gigantibus and Quod Deus Sit Immutabilis. Brown Judaic Series 25. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983.
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