The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Keble College: The Record 2009
knowledge of Greek and Latin, we can combine the pieces of
information offered by such ancient ‘historians of philosophy’
and reconstruct, to some extent at least, the views and sayings
of the ancient philosophers that would otherwise be doomed to
complete obscurity.
It is this third option that my ongoing research work focuses
on: as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Keble my
‘mission’ is to study Plutarch as historian of philosophy with a
view to evaluating his understanding and presentation of past
philosophical theories in his works.
Plutarch of Chaeroneia was a scholar, Platonist philosopher
and, perhaps most eminently, a biographer of the 1 st –2 nd century
ad. However, he is not the sort of figure that immediately
springs to mind when one thinks about ‘history of ancient
(Greek) philosophy’. More celebrated for his biographical work,
the famous Lives which have inspired great minds, such as Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and Shakespeare, Plutarch is less known for
his philosophical work; this is preserved in a collection of essays
in 15 volumes named Moralia, but is usually taken to be only
‘popular philosophy’ (the negative connotations of the term are
obvious!). Often dubbed a ‘Platonist’ exegete, his acumen as a
philosopher has generally not been considered very highly; he,
therefore, only marginally figures in modern histories of ancient
philosophy as a philosopher in his own right. His wide learning
may be appreciated, but not so his philosophical originality
and spirit. At the same time, however, Plutarch is one of the
few 1 st –2 nd century ad philosophers whose writings survive to
a great extent and contain an enormous amount of precious
information about the philosophy of his past and the theories of
ancient philosophers whose works are now lost. Hence Plutarch
frequently figures among our list of secondary sources for
ancient philosophical theories which are only fragmentarily
preserved today. Nonetheless, Plutarch has still suffered ‘bad
press’: scholars have often come to the conclusion that he
probably misinterpreted the point of the philosophical theory
he reports in his essays, either because of lack of philosophical
acumen or out of bias.
Now I dare say there is a bit of a paradox lurking here: on the
one hand, we use Plutarch’s philosophical works as a source,
and on the other hand, we do not, by and large, pay all that
much attention to the way in which Plutarch dealt with and
interpreted the philosophical theses of the past of which he is
a source; and even if we do, our judgement about Plutarch’s
interpretation tends to be not a very flattering one. Yet, in order
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