Angela Ulacco

Among the debates on the eternity of the world in post-Hellenistic period, Ps.-Timaeus Locrus’ treatise On the nature of the world and the soul has attracted attention for its non-temporalist interpretation of the generation of the cosmos in Plato’s Timaeus. Nevertheless, this interpretation has largely been treated as a mere parallel for the ‘didactic’ interpretation of the Timaeus supposedly defended by Eudorus of Alexandria. In this article, I argue that Ps.-Timaeus offers far more than a parallel to Eudorus. He understands generation as non-temporal dependence on ontologically prior principles and may have been the first post-Hellenistic interpreter we know of to have developed his reading of Plato’s Timaeus by indirectly answering Aristotle’s criticism of Plato and the Academics that a generated cosmos cannot be eternal.

‘Authority’ is a widely used, but not very well-defined concept in scholarly discourse. Epistemologists have become increasingly interested in the concept of epistemic authority specifically. So far, however, their discussions have not been brought to bear upon historical scholarship. We propose a model, then, for examining epistemic authority in texts and textual traditions. In order to do so, we examine the ontology and epistemology of epistemic authority. We argue that epistemic authority is not just a scholarly tool, but a phenomenon belonging to social reality. Ultimately, it is constituted by single acts of attribution, which are then, in one way or another, communicated and disseminated. We also specify the different elements that make up the structure of the authority relation and specify its varieties due to the epistemological quality of the attributed property as well as the grounds for its attribution. This results in a grid of parameters that helps to disambiguate the term ‘authority’, facilitating a comparison across case studies from various domains. The model is descriptive and offers a means by which to classify de facto attributions of authority, whether these attributions are legitimate or not. A few examples from scholarship on ancient Platonism illustrate the complexity of the issue and the benefits of our model.

Ancient philosophy is known for its organisation into distinct schools. But those schools were not locked into static dogmatism. As recent scholarship has shown, lively debate persisted between and within traditions. Yet the interplay between tradition and disagreement remains underexplored. This volume asks, first, how philosophers talked about differences of opinion within and between traditions and, second, how such debates affected the traditions involved. It covers the period from the first century BCE, which witnessed a turn to authoritative texts in different philosophical movements, through the rise of Christianity, to the golden age of Neoplatonic commentaries in the fifth and sixth centuries CE. By studying various philosophical and Christian traditions alongside and in interaction with each other, this volume reveals common philosophical strategies of identification and differentiation. Ancient authors construct their own traditions in their (polemical) engagements with dissenters and opponents. Yet this very process of dissociation helped establish a common conceptual ground between traditions. This volume will be an important resource for specialists in late ancient philosophy, early Christianity, and the history of ideas.