Philosopher
Philo of Alexandria
fl. 10 BCE – 50 CE
Also known as Philo Judaeus
Jewish thinker of Roman Alexandria who read Scripture through Greek philosophy, treating philosophy as the servant of revelation; often called the founder of negative theology.
Philo’s life in Alexandria fell somewhere between the late first century BCE and the mid-first century CE, a time of sharp tension between the city’s Greeks and Jews. His brother Alexander was one of the few Jews granted citizenship, and Philo himself recorded the anti-Jewish violence of 38 CE in two books. Scholars still debate whether he should count as a philosopher at all.
His surviving work, largely commentary on Scripture, sets philosophy at the service of revelation, borrowing the concepts of Greek reason to give his reading of the Law a wider reach. He greatly admired Plato, but his God, at once unknowable and near, is not quite Plato’s. His treatises can seem disordered, since he accepted contradiction as a normal way of speaking; but he was neither muddled nor ignorant, and deliberately took apart Greek patterns of thought that, in his view, put the self first.
Key ideas
- Human nothingness
- Where Stoics and Cynics made self-construction the philosopher’s task, Philo set out to show that human beings are nothing of themselves: only by admitting this, and relying on God, the source of freedom, reason and consciousness, can a person truly exist.
- Allegory and the literal sense
- Biblical stories are not myths of the poets’ kind but hints at types of character that call for allegorical reading. Yet Philo held it a mistake to throw out the literal meaning; hidden senses come by divine illumination, through the letter, or by allegory.
- An unknowable God
- Philo is often counted the founder of negative theology among the monotheistic faiths: God is wholly unknowable and beyond description, and yet very close to humankind.
- The powers of God
- God acts through powers, chief among them a creative and a ruling power, with others beneath them. Philo varied his language about them, probably so as not to suggest that the powers had a reality of their own.
Influences
Where these links come from
- Philo of Alexandria drew on Plato. Source: Carlos Lévy, Philo of Alexandria, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Allegorical Commentary
- Against Flaccus (In Flaccum)
- Read free at Wikisource (translated by C. D. Yonge)
- On the Embassy to Gaius (Legatio ad Gaium)
- Read free at Wikisource (translated by C. D. Yonge, titled On the Virtues and Office of Ambassadors)
Sources
- Carlos Lévy, Philo of Alexandria, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy