Porphyry of Tyre Simulacrum

The Life

Porphyry was born in Tyre, on the Phoenician coast, in 234 CE, under the name Malchus. He studied in Athens under the scholar Longinus, who gave him the Greek name Porphyry, and then moved to Rome, where in 263 CE he joined Plotinus's circle. He lived and studied with Plotinus for six years; a severe depression, from which Plotinus's counsel rescued him, led him to Sicily for a period of recovery, but he returned to direct the Roman school after his teacher's death. He lived until approximately 305 CE.

The Thought

Porphyry's two great services to philosophy were editorial and logical. After Plotinus's death he collected his teacher's treatises, arranged them into the six *enneads* or groups of nine, and appended the *Life of Plotinus* that remains the principal biographical source for its subject. Without this labour the *Enneads* would have survived, if at all, in a condition scarcely recoverable.

His own substantial contribution to philosophy was the *Isagoge*, a short introduction to Aristotle's *Categories* that raised the celebrated question whether genera and species exist in themselves, in material things, or only as concepts in the mind. Translated into Latin by Boethius in the sixth century, the *Isagoge* became the basic logic textbook of the medieval Latin West, and the question it raised — the problem of universals — was the central problem of medieval philosophy for the next eight hundred years.

Porphyry wrote much else that has not survived intact. His *Against the Christians*, a fifteen-book philosophical attack on the new religion, was condemned and burned by imperial order in the fifth century; only fragments remain. His *On Abstinence from Eating Animals* survives and presents a philosophical vegetarianism grounded in Platonic psychology. His *Sentences*, a compressed exposition of Plotinian doctrine, remains in full.

The Legacy

Porphyry's *Isagoge* shaped the logical training of every educated person in Latin Christendom from Boethius to the fourteenth century. The problem of universals — realism versus conceptualism versus nominalism — runs in an unbroken line from the *Isagoge* through Abelard to Ockham, and is still a live question. The editorial work on the *Enneads* is the reason Plotinus is readable today. And the *Against the Christians*, even in its mutilated state, remains the most formidable philosophical critique of Christianity produced in late antiquity.