Best of us all the best he Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy dot net today's episode United

we Fall Latin philosophy in Byzantium.

When I was covering Latin medieval philosophy on this podcast series, perhaps I was a little

bit unkind to Thomas Aquinas, Though he received extensive coverage, one of the main points of that

coverage was to shift him away from center stage, to emphasize that he was only one of several

important thinkers of high scholasticism and one who was in some ways out of step

with his contemporaries.

And I pointed out that other philosophers of the 13th century, such as Albert the Great, Henry of Kent, and Duns Skotus had a greater impact in the following

century than Aquinas did. If you're an admirer of Aquinas, who is still nursing a grudge

about this, then you'll be glad to know that in today's episode I won't be doubting Thomas or his influence.

To the contrary, I will be pointing to a largely unknown aspect of his legacy, the Greek translation and Byzantine reception of his works.

Usually we think of philosophy as moving from Greek to Latin, not the other way around.

That process began with Cicero and Boethius in Antiquity, was pushed forward by

medieval translators like Ariugina and William of Murabecke, and then famously brought to final

fruition by the Scholars of the Renaissance will be covering before long,

men like Marsilio Ficino with his translation of platonic works into Latin.

To think of Aquinas and other philosophers being translated from Latin into Greek, just as the

Renaissance was about to begin in the West, and in the final years of the Eastern Empire

seems like history getting things backwards.

But the Latin Greek translations can also be seen as the culmination of a long series of encounters

between West and East, encounters that had been going on throughout the whole Byzantine period.

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