The term philosophia has a wide range of meanings in Byzantine authors, signifying eloquence, education, encyclopedic knowledge, the Christian way of life with reference, for example, to martyrdom and the monastic life (Ddlger 1953:197-208). If this range is too wide for our purposes, it would also be too restrictive to define Byzantine philosophy within the limits of what would count as ‘philosophy’ in a modern university department of philosophy. New students in the Neoplatonic philosophical schools of Athens and Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries were provided with a standard list of six definitions of philosophy: (1) the knowledge of beings (onta) as beings; (2) the knowledge of divine and human matters; (3) a preparation {melete) for death; (4) the assimilation (homoiosis) of man to God to the extent possible; (5) the art (techne) of arts and the science of sciences; and (6) the love of wisdom. The six definitions of philosophy correspond to Aristotefian (1,5), Stoic (2), and (Neo-)Platonic (3, 4) conceptions of philosophy, indicating also (6) the origin of the word (cf. Westerink, Trouillard, and Segonds 1990: xlix-liii). These school definitions, understood as complementary and as unified by the purpose of philosophy expressed in definition 4, appear again in various Byzantine authors, for example in John of Damascus’ DialecHca. For our purposes, we might speak of ‘Byzantine philosophy’ in terms of the interest taken by Byzantine authors in the complex heritage of ancient philosophy, in particular Aristotelian, Stoic, and (Neo-)Platonic texts, their work with these texts, their contributions to issues raised in these texts, their application and development of concepts and theories originating in these teicts in relation to the intellectual issues of their own time and society.
The philosophical schools of Late Antiquity also provided Byzantine thinkers with an articulation of philosophy, a division into various sciences constituting a scale of rising value. At first ‘practical philosophy’ (including ethics, ‘economics’ (i. e. domestic ethics), and politics) teaches a rationally ordered moral life of the soul as joined to the body (cf. O’Meara 2003: 50-65). The moral virtues thus acquired allow progress to a higher life, that of the intellectual virtues cultivated in ‘theoretical philosophy’, which includes physics, mathematics, and ‘theology’ (in the Aristotelian sense, i. e. metaphysics). ‘Theology’ is the highest philosophical science because it has to do with knowledge of transcendent, first (divine) principles, bringing the soul nearer to assimilation to the divine. This division of philosophy also constituted a curriculum in which the works of Aristotle and of Plato were read as exemplifying the different sciences arranged in the rising scale. Logic, considered often as the instrument of science, was studied at the beginning of the curriculum, before practical philosophy (Rouech6 1974). The division of philosophy is found again, for example, in John of Damascus and can be traced, much later, in Psellos’ description of his intellectual development (Otron. 6. 36-8). Psellos also seems to have used it in his own teaching of philosophy. However, the philosophical curriculum in Byzantium in most cases probably did not extend beyond the beginning stage, logic, going on sometimes perhaps to ethics, physics, mathematics.
World History
