Having now benefited from viable editions and studies of many of the most important authors within the Neoplatonic tradition of western philosophy, it is time for us to read these materials more actively in terms of the philosophical developments of the late twentieth century that provide the greatest opportunities for intertextual exploration. The hermeneutical project that beckons was begun in Stephen Gersh's Neoplatonism after Derrida: Parallelograms (Brill, 2006) and is raised to a higher power in his present volume. Here a new course is charted in the reading of such ancient authors as Proclus, Damascius, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Meister Eckhart through a critical engagement with the deconstructions of pagan and Christian Neoplatonic texts in the writings of Jacques Derrida.

This volume deals with the relation between Derrida and Neoplatonism (ancient, patristic, medieval), presenting that relation in the form not only of the actual reading of Neoplatonism by Derrida but also of a hypothetical reading of Derrida by Neoplatonism.

The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo’s expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the work, Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work’s musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner’s musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard’s correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.

This volume makes a significant contribution to both the study of Derrida and of modernist studies. The contributors argue, first, that deconstruction is not “modern”; neither is it “postmodern” nor simply “modernist.” They also posit that deconstruction is intimately connected with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature stands out as a “modern” notion. The contributors investigate the nature and depth of Derrida's affinities with writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin, among others. With its strong connection between philosophy and literary modernism, this highly original volume advances modernist literary study and the relationship of literature and philosophy.

It is not soul, not intellect, not imagination, opinion, reason and not understanding, not logos, not intellection, not spoken, not thought, not number, not order, not greatness, not smallness, not equality, not inequality, not likeness, not unlikeness, not having stood, not moved, not at rest, not powerful, not intepowerful, not light, not living, not life, not eternity, not time, not intellectual contact with it, not knowledge, not truth, not kingship, not wisdom, not one, not unity, not divinity, not goodness, not spirit , not sonhood, not fatherhood, ..., not something among what is not, not something among what is, not known as it is by beings, not a knower of beings as they are. There is neither logos, name, or knowledge of it. It is neither dark nor light, not error, and not truth. There is universally neither postulation nor abstraction of it. While there are produced postulations and abstractions of those after it, we neither postulate nor abstract it. Since beyond all postulation is the all-complete and single Cause of all; beyond all abstraction: the preeminence of that absolutely free of all and beyond the whole. (Dionysius the Areopagite, De mystica theologia V).

Origen has been always studied as a theologian and too much credit has been given to Eusebius’ implausible hagiography of him. This book explores who Origen really was, by pondering into his philosophical background, which determines his theological exposition implicitly, yet decisively. For this background to come to light, it took a ground-breaking exposition of Anaxagoras’ philosophy and its legacy to Classical and Late Antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Origen, Neoplatonism), assessing critically Aristotle’s distorted representation of Anaxagoras. Origen, formerly a Greek philosopher of note, whom Proclus styled an anti-Platonist, is placed in the history of philosophy for the first time. By drawing on his Anaxagorean background, and being the first to revive the Anaxagorean Theory of Logoi, he paved the way to Nicaea. He was an anti-Platonist because he was an Anaxagorean philosopher with far-reaching influence, also on Neoplatonists such as Porphyry. His theology made an impact not only on the Cappadocians, but also on later Christian authors. His theory of the soul, now expounded in the light of his philosophical background, turns out more orthodox than that of some Christian stars of the Byzantine imperial orthodoxy.

This is the first book to provide an account of the influence of Proclus, a member of the Athenian Neoplatonic School, during more than one thousand years of European history (c.500–1600). Proclus was the most important philosopher of late antiquity, a dominant (albeit controversial) voice in Byzantine thought, the second most influential Greek philosopher in the later western Middle Ages (after Aristotle), and a major figure (together with Plotinus) in the revival of Greek philosophy in the Renaissance. Proclus was also intensively studied in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages and was a major influence on the thought of medieval Georgia. The volume begins with a substantial essay by the editor summarizing the entire history of Proclus' reception. This is followed by the essays of more than a dozen of the world's leading authorities in the various specific areas covered.