Professor George Karamanolis

Professor George Karamanolis

University of Vienna

gkaramanolis@univie.ac.at

Ι am a historian of philosophy specializing in Ancient Philosophy, where my main areas of research are Later Ancient Philosophy and Hellenistic Philosophy. In my first book Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry, Oxford 2006 (revised pbk edition 2013), I explore the debate among Platonists from the 1st c. BC to the 4th c. AD on whether the philosophy of Aristotle can be used as an instrument for understanding Plato, and I investigate the philosophical assumptions that guided ancient Platonists in different interpretations of Plato. In my articles on Numenius and Plutarch in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I show how a coherent version of Platonism can be established through interpretations of specific parts of Plato. I have subsequently gravitated towards two other groups of Later Ancient philosophers, Aristotelians and Christians. In my paper in OSAP XL 2011 I discuss how late Aristotelians came to different conceptions of the place of ethics in Aristotle’s philosophy, while in a thematic study of The Philosophy of Early Christianity (Acumen 2013; revised edition forthcoming), I set out to show how early Christian thinkers were engaged in similar debates with contemporary Platonists and Peripatetics, on issues such as cosmogony, first principles, and the soul-body relation. In the recent years I have been working on Cicero’s philosophical writings and especially his ethics, but also on early Christian philosophers such as Clement, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. I have recently finished a modern Greek translation with commentary of Cicero’s De finibus (jointly with Eirini Mitousi; forthcoming from MIET) and a collective volume on Ps-Aristotle’s De mundo with Pavel Gregoric (forthcoming from CUP). I am currently working on a commentary on Ennead III.8, papers on the origins of values in Stoicism, the Roman ethical concept of dignitas, on the fragments of Chrysippus ῾On Providence῾, contained in a Herculaneum papyrus (PHerc.  1038), and on a modern Greek translation of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics as a member of research group hosted by the Research Center on Greek Philosophy at the Academy of Athens.