Best of the Philosophy Department at King Scholars London and the LMLU and Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Georgia on My Mind, Petrizzi and the Proclus Revival.

Those who reject philosophy are doomed to engage in it.

If you tell a philosopher that philosophy is a waste of time and can't possibly prove anything, the philosopher

will brighten up and say, what an interesting philosophical claim that is, what's your argument

for it? Hence the fate of the numerous figures in the medieval age who attacked philosophy and for their pains have become the object of intense study by historians of philosophy.

As I observed a while back when covering one such critic, Iptimea, this is in large part because the

critics' arguments are themselves inevitably philosophical.

Disputation over the art of logic drew Imtaimie into detailed analysis of theories of proof and knowledge, going back to Avicenna.

Avicenna was the obvious target for any polemic against philosophy in the Islamic world, already identified by

Erzali as such within a few generations of his death.

Similarly, in Latin Christendom, anti- philosophers like Manigold of Lautenbach, attacked Plato in the early period

when he was the dominant figure. But once Aristotle became central to the university curriculum in the

13th century, he and his followers were in the firing line, as we can see with the condemnation issued at Paris in the 1270s.

So who would a Byzantine critic of philosophy take as their antagonist?

You might expect it to be Aristotle in this case too,

given all those commentaries that scholars were devoting to his treatises,

but remember that the Byzantine's new ancient Greek literature much better than

did those who were dependent on Arabic or Latin. They could read everything we can read today and more.

And whatever the Bishop of Paris may have thought we can read today and more.

And whatever the Bishop of Paris may have thought, there were ancient philosophers

who were far more problematic from a Christian point of view than Aristotle, none more so

...