Draft Programme

This culminating event in our series of workshops will be held at the British Institute at Ankara, recognising the importance of the eastern Mediterranean in post-hellenistic philosophical networks. The programme reflects the explicit aims of the project to establish the appropriate historiographical context for first-order reconstruction of philosophical debate at this period; and to balance local practices of philosophy with the translocal theoretical engagements of their networks.

INTRODUCTORY (Day 1)

Panel 1: Historiographical context

PART I (Days 2-4): Contexts

Panel 2. The meaning and constitution of “schools”

Panel 3. Cognate intellectual networks (medicine, law, rhetoric)

Panel 4. Technologies of philosophical communication and debate

Panel 5. “Place studies”: Apamea, Tarsus, Rome

PART II (days 5-7): philosophy in theory and practice

Panel 6. Ethics

• the impersonal Good and personal gods

Panel 7. Dialectic

• formal logic and sophistical rhetoric

Panel 8: Metaphysics

• ontological hierarchies and theurgical mediation

Panel 9: Natural philosophy

• understanding causes and technological successes