Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with

the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LEMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode,

Hooked on Classics Itilos and the debate over pagan learning.

Suppose you meet someone at a party who recommends a new restaurant that has just opened in your neighborhood.

You make a mental note to go there next time you get a chance.

As your chat continues, this same party guest begins to argue that the 1969 moon landing was faked by the government.

In addition to excusing yourself to go fresh in your drink, you would probably also tear up that mental note about the restaurant.

This might be a mistake, given that partisans of wacky conspiracy theories are probably able to appreciate good food just as well as the rest of us,

yet it's almost irresistible to downgrade the value of testimony in this way.

We want to take advice from people who are reliable, and when someone makes a dramatic lapse in judgment, we are apt to dismiss that person's other beliefs.

Which raises the question, why would the Byzantine's have been interested in anything that pagan philosophers had to say?

As deeply committed Christians, they were convinced that Plato, Aristotle and other Hellenic

thinkers were wrong about the most important beliefs of all.

They were mistaken about the true nature of God and knew nothing of the salvation offered by Christ.

So why treat them as philosophical authorities, having their works laboriously copied out by hand

and made the subject of extensive study and commentary?

Why not start from scratch, or rather exclusively Christian

Christian basis for doing philosophy and theology.

As we know, the same dilemma confronted thinkers of Latin and Christendom, and to some extent the solutions

devised there were also echoed in Byzantium.

One strategy was to compartmentalize.

...