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International Conference, Commentating as Philosophy and the Abrahamic Interpreters, Istanbul, July 2-5, 2014

"Commentating as Philosophy and the Abrahamic Interpreters" was a conference, second in a trilogy, entitled, "The Abrahamic Trilogy". The trilogy is about the development and reception of Greek philosophy in the Abrahamic traditions. While the first conference was about Proclus, and his influence, the present conference focussed on the form of philosophy that was dominant until the early modern period. The Abrahamic religions have a set of revealed holy texts which are intended to reveal the nature of God, creation, man's place in it and his true destiny. As such, believers or those entrusted to guide the believers can or ought to have recourse to these texts to explain the nature of things. The intellectual and moral life was framed in interaction with a text. Parallel to this, one can view a similar tendency with the philosophical movement known as middle Platonism: here, philosophy was done by turning to the texts of Plato and Aristotle and either making commentaries on them or employing their texts liberally in independent treatises. These two threads meet powerfully, for example, in the Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, Philo. What is unique about Philo is how he used the philosophical concepts and systems of Plato and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle, to explain the Torah. Augustine claimed only to understand the Bible after reading the works of the Platonists and whose Biblical commentaries dominated the Latin west. Ibn-Sina also wrote many commentaries on Aristotle and developed his own system in that dialogue. Thus, for 1600 years, whether by a pagan or Abrahamic philosopher, the dominant mode of philosophising was done by means of writing commentaries. The conference, thus, explored the development of the commentary tradition within the ancient pagan world and the influence of that Greek commentary among Jews, Christians and Muslims and will focus on what it means to philosophise in a necessary interaction with a set texts that marks it off from early modern philosophy. Keynote/Plenary speakers: Prof. Richard Sorabji, CBE, FBA, (Wolfson College, Oxford and Emeritus, King's College, London) gave the key-note lecture. Prof. Zev Harvey (Emeritus Prof. at Hebrew University and Columbia University) gave the plenary lecture on Jewish account and Prof. Thomas Leinkauf (Westfälischen Wilhelms Universität Münster) on the Christian account and Asst. Prof. Olga Lizzini (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) the Islamic account.

Plato; Aristotle; commentators; philosophy; Abrahamic religions; Judaism; Christianity; Islam; Middle Platonism; intellectual; moral

The conference was coorganized by Marie-Elise Zovko, Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, and David Butorac, Fatih University Istanbul, as well as by the Plato Society of Zagreb, the Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, the Consulate of Greece, Istanbul, The Consulate General of Israel, Istanbul and the Onnasis Foundation.