Philo Judaeus(Fl. 20 Bce–40 Ce)
Philo Judaeus, the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher, was the son of a wealthy and prominent Alexandrian family. Philo was well educated in both Judaism and Greek philosophy. Little is known about the actual events of his life except that in 40 CE the Jewish community of Alexandria sent him as the head of a delegation to Emperor Caligula to seek redress from the wrongs which the Gentile population inflicted upon the Jews. His Legacy to Gaius tells the story of this mission. Although he also wrote moral and philosophic treatises on problems then current, the main bulk of his writings are philosophic discourses on certain topics of the Hebrew Scripture. In content they are, on the one hand, an attempt to interpret the scriptural teachings in terms of Greek philosophy and, on the other, an attempt to revise Greek philosophy in the light of those scriptural traditions.
The scriptural teachings with which Philo set out to revise Greek philosophy contained certain definite conceptions of the nature of God and his relation to the world but only vague allusions to the structure and composition of the world. In dealing with the latter, therefore, he felt free to select from the various views of Greek philosophers whichever seemed to him the most reasonable, although occasionally he supported the selection by a scriptural citation.
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