Event

Why do we write? More fundamentally, should we write, and how do the ways we think about and use texts shape us and our communities? This presentation explores the ways that two contemporary late-ancient intellectual communities—the philosophical circle of the Platonists Plotinus and Porphyry and the community of Christian scholar-ascetics around Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea—developed particular “ethics of textuality.” Instead of a historical narrative that describes the history of Neoplatonism and Christianity in terms of oversimplified differences between “pagans” and “Christians,” this presentation is interested in a historical narrative that looks at the  different ways that competing intellectual communities developed answers to shared theoretical and practical issues surrounding textuality.