Daniel Patrick O'Connell

The late Michael Frede once drew a distinction between the study of the history of philosophy in its own right and “a philosophically oriented study of the history of philosophy.” The key difference was that the study of the history of philosophy in its own right had to be aware of the historical context of the views it studied, both in a narrower and in a broader context, which broader context might very well have little to do with philosophy as such. A careful consideration of the contextual and oftentimes non-philosophical reasons given for a philosophical position was necessary in order to get past any “doxographical substitute” for a philosopher’s position—a position and chain of reasoning that might be assigned to a philosopher because of one’s own philosophical interests—to get to the true position of that philosopher, e.g., Aristotle on the question of the agent intellect.Eric Perl, in his introduction to this study of Dionysius the Areopagite, positions himself strongly in the tradition of what Frede would have called doxographical or philosophically oriented history of philosophy. Thus, he would differ with Frede on the question of what is most important in exploring the positions of

The past years have seen the official completion of the Opera Omnia of Nicholas of Cusa and have witnessed, as well, the production of a plethora of new studies on this fifteenth-century thinker. It is no longer enough, however, to be familiar with scholarship in German, Italian, and English in order to have a comprehensive view of the newer Cusanus research. One must also have a command of Spanish and Portuguese as well. An informal survey of the Philosopher's Index, by no means exhaustive, of the secondary literature on Cusa reveals that over the last decade, the ratio approaches 1:1 when one compares Spanish and Portuguese entries on Cusa with those in other languages. Although Cusa was already a figure of interest in these two countries in the early 1960s, due in no small part to the work of Eusebio Colomer involving Ramon Llull, and that of Mariano Álvarez-Gómez, one can now see the work of these earlier scholars bearing fruit in the work of their students and their students' students. This scholarship, while it may be categorized broadly as history of philosophy or ideas, has tended to

Stephen Gersh aims in this fascinating collection to demonstrate “for the first time” that there is a “grand narrative” of Proclus’s influence in European thought. His introductory essay presents the demonstration in broad outlines, and the seventeen essays that follow flesh out his initial observations. This framing of the work—consisting of a series of essays on Proclus and his reception from Dionysius the Areopagite to Francesco Patrizi—casts it as a capstone of Gersh’s more than forty years of scholarship on Proclus and the Platonic tradition. In “Proclus as theologian,” Gersh distinguishes within Proclus’s theology between “reason” and “revelation” suggesting that we take the two...