Greece & Rome · c. 234–305
Porphyry
Plotinus’ student, editor and biographer
Edited Plotinus’ Enneads and wrote the Isagoge, an introduction to Aristotle’s logic that posed the medieval problem of universals: do genera and species really exist? He also wrote a polemic against the Christians that was later burned.
Life and thought
Porphyry was born in Tyre, in Phoenicia, around 234 CE, with the Semitic name Malchus (“king”). He studied in Athens with Longinus, then in 263 joined Plotinus’ circle in Rome. After a bout of depression he left for Sicily on Plotinus’ advice, and after his master’s death he edited the treatises as the Enneads, with a Life of Plotinus. He wrote prolifically on philosophy, religion, Homer and vegetarianism.
His most lasting work is the Isagoge, a short introduction to Aristotle’s logic. In it he asks, and deliberately leaves open, whether genera and species, such as “animal” and “human”, exist in reality or only in thought, and, if real, whether they are bodily and separate from things. Translated into Latin by Boethius, this aside launched the medieval problem of universals. He also wrote Against the Christians, a learned critique of scripture that Christian emperors ordered burned; it survives only in fragments. Through him Aristotle’s logic became a standard part of a Platonist education.