Why does Philo of Alexandria seem to avoid the open use of dialectic, which was regarded in the ancient world – together with physics and ethics – as one of the three main divisions of philosophy? Has this got anything to do with the tension between proper logic and the sophistic practices of his age? Does Philo’s interpretation of Abraham’s migration from Ur of the Chaldees include a hidden political message? Why, according to Philo, did Jacob mourn the manner of Joseph’s death more than his death itself? These and other questions of the same kind are discussed in the present collection of essays, investigating Philo’s philosophical, historical and cultural background, as well as his relations to Judaism and Christianity. This book attempts to improve our understanding of some of the complexities of Philo’s thought by raising new questions, exploring the ideological aspects of Philo’s approach to Scripture, and attempting to understand the nature of Philo “the Platonist’s” attitude to various issues raised in Plato’s dialogues.

An inquiry drawing on the presence of Hellenistic philosophy in Philo provides a better knowledge of the diffusion of Hellenistic philosophy since the late Republican age, as well as the relationship between Philoa (TM)s reception and other doxohraphical tradition.

Philo was a Greek-educated but observant Jew who lived during the time of Jesus and Paul. According to the author, Philo's writings synthesized earlier Greek and Jewish perceptions of women. Although Philo accepts the female as good because created by God, Sly argues that Philo nevertheless saw women as necessarily subservient and under the control of men. Thus his writings express some of the earliest sources for repressive attitudes towards women, and suggest that similar attitudes exhibited by the church fathers may be traced through Philo to earlier traditions.

Philo (20BCE?-45CE?) is the most illustrious son of Alexandrian Jewry and the first major scholar to combine a deep Jewish learning with Greek philosophy. His unique allegorical exegesis of the Greek Bible was to have a profound influence on the early fathers of the Church. Philo was, above all, a philosopher, but he was also intensely practical in his defence of the Jewish faith and law in general, and that of Alexandria’s embattled Jewish community in particular. A famous example was his leadership of a perilous mission to plead the community’s cause to Emperor Caligula. This monograph provides a guide to Philo's life, his thought and his action, as well as his continuing influence on theological and philosophical thought.

In Greek Writers and Philosophers in Philo and Josephus Erkki Koskenniemi investigates how two Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, quoted, mentioned and referred to Greek writers and philosophers. He asks what this tells us about their Greek education, their contacts with Classical culture in general, and about the societies in which Philo and Josephus lived. Although Philo in Alexandria and Josephus in Jerusalem both had the possibility to acquire a thorough knowledge of Greek language and culture, they show very different attitudes. Philo, who was probably admitted to the gymnasium, often and enthusiastically refers to Greek poets and philosophers. Josephus on the other hand rarely quotes from their works, giving evidence of a more traditionalistic tendencies among Jewish nobility in Jerusalem.