Papers by Gretchen Reydams-Schils
The Reception of Philo of Alexandria, ed. by C. Friesen, D. Lincicum, and D. Runia (Oxford University Press) 532-541, 2025
Gregory of Nyssa: On the Hexaemeron: Text and Studies, ed. by Anna Marmodoro and Johannes Zachhuber. Oxford University Press, 2025
This paper reassesses the question of potential Stoic influences on Gregory’s work 'On the Six Da... more This paper reassesses the question of potential Stoic influences on Gregory’s work 'On the Six Days of Creation.' I turn to this question after establishing that the Platonist traits of this account are much less pronounced than is traditionally assumed.
I focus, in sum, on the following, that in this account of Gregory's:
i. There is in creation a dynamic process according to akolouthia, taxis, and heirmos.
ii. This dynamic process expressed in terms of power (dunamis) and wisdom/logos has its origin in the power and wisdom/logos of God, which, while being transcendent, are nevertheless also present in the created order.
I advance the thesis that Gregory’s attempt to make use of the notion of (seminal) logoi is merely parallel to what we find in Plotinus and the Platonist tradition—that is, it represents a different attempt to integrate this notion into a view that posits a transcendent God.
This attempt, I submit, is the most important Stoic influence in this text, and constitutes the core around which his echoes of Stoicism are clustered. It is crucial to a correct understanding of Gregory’s account of creation. Although he does not provide any details about how exactly he sees the relation between these aspects of his transcendent God and the ordered world, the ideas and language he borrows from Stoicism allow Gregory to present this relation as unmediated by any entity-- neither by an Intellect or Soul, conceived in Platonist terms, nor by Christ, as Origen and other Christian authors would have it.
Now available in Open Access: 'Philo of Alexandria and Philosophical Discourse,' ed. by L. Doering and M. Cover., 2024
In this paper -- for a collection of essays on the role of philosophy in Philo of Alexandria's wo... more In this paper -- for a collection of essays on the role of philosophy in Philo of Alexandria's works-- I reexamine Philo's attitude towards natural philosophy in light of Maren Niehoff's thesis that the works which he wrote after his embassy to Rome show a markedly more Stoic bent than his earlier writings. In a review of that book, I have suggested that it might be helpful now to look for what I called "bridge" concepts or texts, which would allow us to detect connections between these different phases of Philo's intellectual trajectory, that is, before and after his visit to Rome, and advance our understanding of the alleged shift. One such set of bridge-concepts could be provided by Plato's Timaeus, because, as I have argued before, by the time Philo came to use the Timaeus, Stoic and Platonist elements had already become intertwined in the history of its interpretation. The paper is now available through Open Access, in 'Philo of Alexandria and Philosophical Discourse,' ed. by L. Doering and M. Cover (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2024).
“Philautia, self-knowledge, and oikeiôsis in Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch,” in Plutarch and t... more “Philautia, self-knowledge, and oikeiôsis in Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch,” in Plutarch and the New Testament in Their Religio-Philosophical Contexts. Bridging Discourses in the World of the Early Roman Empire, ed. by R. Hirsch-Luipold (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022) 125-140
Celsus in His World: Philosophy, Polemic and Religion in the Second Century, 2021
The main challenge in assessing Celsus' relation with the Second Sophistic is that we have so lit... more The main challenge in assessing Celsus' relation with the Second Sophistic is that we have so little context for the work which Origen excerpted in his Contra Celsum. So, the issues presented here are necessarily speculative. There is considerable help to be had, however, from recent groundbreaking developments in the scholarship on the Second Sophistic that reassess the role of philosophy in that current of Greek culture in the Roman world. Lieve Van Hoof (2010), for instance, has reexamined a number of Plutarch's ethical treatises from that angle, Jeroen Lauwers (2015) has reclaimed Maximus of Tyre as a philosopher, and Maren Niehoff (2018) has analysed Philo of Alexandria's work after his embassy to Rome in terms of his encounter with Roman culture, and Roman philosophy in particular. 1
Self, Self-Fashioning, and Individuality in Late Antiquity, 2019
Plato and the Poets, 2011
In this paper I discuss how the relation between myth, logos, and poetry is reflected by the diff... more In this paper I discuss how the relation between myth, logos, and poetry is reflected by the different characters in the Timaeus, and how, in the case of Timaeus' speech, this mode of expression presents a more positive view of mimesis, physical reality, sense perception, and human embodied existence than found in other accounts of Plato's. (Though, admittedly, I should not have used the anachronistic 'nationalist' to describe the character Critias' attitude towards Athens, nor 'imperial' for Athens.)
Judgment and Action. Fragments toward a History, 2017
In this exploratory paper I assess Augustine's critique of the Stoics (which is still very preval... more In this exploratory paper I assess Augustine's critique of the Stoics (which is still very prevalent today) and discuss its aftermath in Neo-Stoicism and Descartes.
The paper's purpose is also to push back against some critiques of the alleged influence of (Neo-)Stoicism on modern conceptions of the self, as exemplified in the work of Taylor and MacIntyre
Apeiron 39.2, 2006
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, 2017
This paper examines the views of Maximus of Tyre on the divine, Providence, and the connection be... more This paper examines the views of Maximus of Tyre on the divine, Providence, and the connection between matter and evil (with a particular focus on Oration 41). Maximus’ rendering of the involvement of the divine in the cosmos reveals a distinctive combination of Platonist and Stoic features. Such a position is not equally present in all so-called Middle Platonist authors such as Alcinous and Numenius. Maximus shows a marked tendency to emphasize the relational aspect of the divine over its purely noetic aspect. This analysis also briefly touches on the repercussions these questions could have for the ‘self’ of human beings.
R. Radice, G. Reydams-Schils, E. Vimercati (éds.), Potere e potenze in Filone di Alessandria. Pou... more R. Radice, G. Reydams-Schils, E. Vimercati (éds.), Potere e potenze in Filone di Alessandria. Pouvoirs et puissances chez Philon d’Alexandrie (actes du colloque international Philon d’Alexandrie, Milan, 14-17 juin 2011), Brepols, 2016, p. 203-217
This is a review article of the series SAPERE
in From Stoicism to Platonism: The Development of Philosophy, 100 BCE - 100 CE, ed. by T. Engberg-Pedersen, 2017
L'Antiquité Classique, 1993
Philosophia in der Konkurrenz von Schulen, Wissenschaften und Religionen. Zur Pluralisierung des Philosophiebegriffs in Kaiserzeit und Spätantike, 2017
Even though the notion of philosophy as " a " or " the art of life " has Socratic-Platonic affini... more Even though the notion of philosophy as " a " or " the art of life " has Socratic-Platonic affinities (one could think, for instance, of Plato's Gorgias and his Alcibiades I), it became truly central in Stoicism. This view of the role of philosophy was pulled into debates between other schools of thought and Stoicism in the first three centuries AD. The secondary literature has tended to focus on Sextus Empiricus' critique of the notion, 1 but in this essay I would like to take the first steps in approaching this debate from a different angle, namely on the basis of one of Plotinus' expositions in which, I would argue, the same polemic is at work, albeit more implicitly. In the second part of this essay we will turn our attention to some of the later Stoics, namely Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus. Two assumptions are central to my approach: first, that the later Stoics have a number of distinctive traits and crucial interests in common, and second, that the debate between Platonists and Stoics underlies many philosophical positions of this period. In order to set the stage for my subsequent argument, it would be helpful to remind ourselves of the principal lines of attack Sextus Empiricus deploys against the Stoic notion of philosophy as the art of life: 2 (1) there are competing versions of what an art of life would amount to and we have no clear criterion of selection, hence a suspension of our judgment about this issue is called for; (2) given that only sages have virtue and can practice the art of life and the Stoics themselves do not claim to be sages, they cannot teach others; (3) given that the Stoics define an " art " as a system of cognitive impressions, this definition presupposes the very existence of cognitive (kata-leptic) impressions (impressions, φαντασίαι, that give us absolutely dependable and true information about the world around us, derived either directly or indirectly from sense perception), which Sextus Empiricus calls into ques
Plato and the Stoics, edited by Alexander Long, Cambridge University Press, 2013
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Papers by Gretchen Reydams-Schils
I focus, in sum, on the following, that in this account of Gregory's:
i. There is in creation a dynamic process according to akolouthia, taxis, and heirmos.
ii. This dynamic process expressed in terms of power (dunamis) and wisdom/logos has its origin in the power and wisdom/logos of God, which, while being transcendent, are nevertheless also present in the created order.
I advance the thesis that Gregory’s attempt to make use of the notion of (seminal) logoi is merely parallel to what we find in Plotinus and the Platonist tradition—that is, it represents a different attempt to integrate this notion into a view that posits a transcendent God.
This attempt, I submit, is the most important Stoic influence in this text, and constitutes the core around which his echoes of Stoicism are clustered. It is crucial to a correct understanding of Gregory’s account of creation. Although he does not provide any details about how exactly he sees the relation between these aspects of his transcendent God and the ordered world, the ideas and language he borrows from Stoicism allow Gregory to present this relation as unmediated by any entity-- neither by an Intellect or Soul, conceived in Platonist terms, nor by Christ, as Origen and other Christian authors would have it.
The paper's purpose is also to push back against some critiques of the alleged influence of (Neo-)Stoicism on modern conceptions of the self, as exemplified in the work of Taylor and MacIntyre
I focus, in sum, on the following, that in this account of Gregory's:
i. There is in creation a dynamic process according to akolouthia, taxis, and heirmos.
ii. This dynamic process expressed in terms of power (dunamis) and wisdom/logos has its origin in the power and wisdom/logos of God, which, while being transcendent, are nevertheless also present in the created order.
I advance the thesis that Gregory’s attempt to make use of the notion of (seminal) logoi is merely parallel to what we find in Plotinus and the Platonist tradition—that is, it represents a different attempt to integrate this notion into a view that posits a transcendent God.
This attempt, I submit, is the most important Stoic influence in this text, and constitutes the core around which his echoes of Stoicism are clustered. It is crucial to a correct understanding of Gregory’s account of creation. Although he does not provide any details about how exactly he sees the relation between these aspects of his transcendent God and the ordered world, the ideas and language he borrows from Stoicism allow Gregory to present this relation as unmediated by any entity-- neither by an Intellect or Soul, conceived in Platonist terms, nor by Christ, as Origen and other Christian authors would have it.
The paper's purpose is also to push back against some critiques of the alleged influence of (Neo-)Stoicism on modern conceptions of the self, as exemplified in the work of Taylor and MacIntyre
by prof. Gretchen Reydams-Schils
(Unpublished).
Anyone interested in the article or my translation of it, should first and foremost approach prof. Gretchen Reydams-Schils, who has a profile on academia.edu as well.
This volume celebrates the scholarship of Professor Johan C. Thom by tackling various important topics relevant for the study of the New Testament, such as the intellectual environment of early Christianity, especially Greek, Latin, and early Jewish texts, New Testament apocrypha and other early Christian writings, as well as Greek grammar. The authors offer fresh insights on philosophical texts and traditions, the cultural repertoire of early Christian literature, critical editions, linguistics and interpretation, and comparative analyses of ancient writings.