Professor Gretchen Reydams-Schils | |
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Academic background | |
Education | Catholic University of Leuven University of Cincinnati |
Alma mater | University of California at Berkeley |
Thesis | Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato's Timaeus |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Ancient philosophy |
Institutions | University of Notre Dame |
Gretchen Reydams-Schils is professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, [1] and holds concurrent appointments in Classics,Philosophy,and Theology. [2] She is a specialist in Plato and the traditions of Platonism and Stoicism. [3]
Gretchen Reydams-Schils gained a BA (magna cum laude) at the Catholic University of Leuven where she majored in Classics,with her Senior Thesis on “Plato’s ‘Myth of Er’in the Republic”;an MA at the University of Cincinnati;and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. [4] Her Classics/Ancient Philosophy dissertation was on “Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato's Timaeus”. She acted as Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven.
She teaches at the University of Notre Dame,where she also runs the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy, [5] She has been a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies and at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies,and also held positions as visiting professor at the University of Bordeaux,France,in 2013;at Montpellier,UniversitéPaul Valéry,France,in 2005;at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg,Germany,in 2002;and at Spiritan Missionary Philosophy Seminary,Arusha,Tanzania,in Spring 1998 during a sabbatical. She was Directrice d’Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études Paris,France,for four seminars on Calcidius,in May–June 2004.
She edited a 2003 edited volume,Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon which explored the influence of Plato's Timaeus and attempted to account for its cultural and philosophic status. [6] In her 2005 book The Roman Stoics:Self,Responsibility,and Affection,she studied the philosophical basis that underpins the way Roman Stoics integrated philosophy into the social practice of living,friendship,political community,parenting and marriage. [7] In a review,Margaret Graver describes it as looking "beyond the Stoics' ethical absolutism to emphasise,instead,their engagement with other human beings". [8]
She has written over 20 philosophy book reviews for learned journals including The Journal of Roman Studies, [9] The Journal of Hellenic Studies, [10] and Classical Philology. [11] She has also won over 20 academic awards and honours,including a Fulbright Fellowship,Humboldt Foundation Fellowship,Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant,and a EURIAS Senior Fellowship.
She published a letter in the Catholic magazine Commonweal marking her discontent at a change to the Nicene Creed,during the tenure of Pope Benedict XVI,in which the phrase “born of the Virgin Mary”was changed to “incarnate of”. [12] In the article she argued that the change identified "a deep strand of repulsion at the female body in the Christian tradition". [12] She is married to professor Luc Reydams with three children.
Plotinus was a Greek Platonist philosopher, born and raised in Roman Egypt. Plotinus is regarded by modern scholarship as the founder of Neoplatonism. His teacher was the self-taught philosopher Ammonius Saccas, who belonged to the Platonic tradition. Historians of the 19th century invented the term "neoplatonism" and applied it to refer to Plotinus and his philosophy, which was vastly influential during late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Much of the biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' most notable literary work, The Enneads. In his metaphysical writings, Plotinus described three fundamental principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His works have inspired centuries of pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and early Islamic metaphysicians and mystics, including developing precepts that influence mainstream theological concepts within religions, such as his work on duality of the One in two metaphysical states.
Timaeus is one of Plato's dialogues, mostly in the form of long monologues given by Critias and Timaeus, written c. 360 BC. The work puts forward reasoning on the possible nature of the physical world and human beings and is followed by the dialogue Critias.
The concept of the anima mundi (Latin), world soul, or soul of the world posits an intrinsic connection between all living beings, suggesting that the world is animated by a soul much like the human body. Rooted in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the idea holds that the world soul infuses the cosmos with life and intelligence. This notion has been influential across various systems of thought, including Stoicism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism, shaping metaphysical and cosmological frameworks throughout history.
Panaetius of Rhodes was an ancient Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in Athens, before moving to Rome where he did much to introduce Stoic doctrines to the city, thanks to the patronage of Scipio Aemilianus. After the death of Scipio in 129 BC, he returned to the Stoic school in Athens, and was its last undisputed scholarch. With Panaetius, Stoicism became much more eclectic. His most famous work was his On Duties, the principal source used by Cicero in his own work of the same name.
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary Platonists do not necessarily accept all doctrines of Plato. Platonism has had a profound effect on Western thought. At the most fundamental level, Platonism affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism. This can apply to properties, types, propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, truth values, and so on. Philosophers who affirm the existence of abstract objects are sometimes called Platonists; those who deny their existence are sometimes called nominalists. The terms "Platonism" and "nominalism" also have established senses in the history of philosophy. They denote positions that have little to do with the modern notion of an abstract object.
Ancient Roman philosophy is philosophy as it was practiced in the Roman Republic and its successor state, the Roman Empire. Roman philosophy includes not only philosophy written in Latin, but also philosophy written in Greek in the late Republic and Roman Empire. Important early Latin-language writers include Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca the Younger. Greek was a popular language for writing about philosophy, so much so that the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius chose to write his Meditations in Greek.
Calcidius was a 4th-century philosopher who translated the first part of Plato's Timaeus from Greek into Latin around the year 321 and provided with it an extensive commentary. This was likely done for Bishop Hosius of Córdoba. Very little is otherwise known of him.
Hellenistic philosophy is Ancient Greek philosophy corresponding to the Hellenistic period in Ancient Greece, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The dominant schools of this period were the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Skeptics.
David Neil Sedley FBA is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University.
A sage, in classical philosophy, is someone who has attained wisdom. The term has also been used interchangeably with a 'good person', and a 'virtuous person'. Among the earliest accounts of the sage begin with Empedocles' Sphairos. Horace describes the Sphairos as "Completely within itself, well-rounded and spherical, so that nothing extraneous can adhere to it, because of its smooth and polished surface." Alternatively, the sage is one who lives "according to an ideal which transcends the everyday."
Eudorus of Alexandria was an ancient Greek philosopher, and a representative of Middle Platonism. He attempted to reconstruct Plato's philosophy in terms of Pythagoreanism.
Commentaries on Plato refers to the great mass of literature produced, especially in the ancient and medieval world, to explain and clarify the works of Plato. Many Platonist philosophers in the centuries following Plato sought to clarify and summarise his thoughts, but it was during the Roman era, that the Neoplatonists, in particular, wrote many commentaries on individual dialogues of Plato, many of which survive to the present day.
Neoplatonism is a version of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One".
Susanne Bobzien is a German-born philosopher whose research interests focus on philosophy of logic and language, determinism and freedom, and ancient philosophy. She currently is senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.
Anne Sheppard is professor of ancient philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. She studied "Greats",, at St Anne's College, Oxford before completing her DPhil at Oxford on the literary theory of the Neoplatonist philosopher, Proclus. Sheppard's research interests relate to the interaction between philosophy and literature.
Many interpreters of Plato held that his writings contain passages with double meanings, called allegories, symbols, or myths, that give the dialogues layers of figurative meaning in addition to their usual literal meaning. These allegorical interpretations of Plato were dominant for more than fifteen hundred years, from about the 1st century CE through the Renaissance and into the 18th century, and were advocated by major Platonist philosophers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Syrianus, Proclus, and Marsilio Ficino. Beginning with Philo of Alexandria, these views influenced the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpretation of these religions' respective sacred scriptures. They spread widely during the Renaissance and contributed to the fashion for allegory among poets such as Dante Alighieri, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.
Lucius Calvenus Taurus was a Greek philosopher of the Middle Platonist school.
Robert Gregg Bury was an Irish clergyman, classicist, philologist, and a translator of the works of Plato and Sextus Empiricus into English.
Elizabeth Gloyn is a Reader in Latin Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, the University of London and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on the intersection between Latin literature, ancient philosophy and gender studies; as well as topics of classical reception, and the history of women in the field of Classics.
Alex Long is a British philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is known for his works on the ancient Greek philosophy. Long is a co-editor of the journal Phronesis.