Universe of Platonic Thought 2022

30th International Conference “The Universe of Platonic Thought: Plato and European Philosophy”

Daniil Dorofeev, DSc in Philosophy, Professor; St Petersburg Mining University (Saint Petersburg, Russia), Head of the Department of Philosophy, Professor

The image of the philosopher in Diogenes Laertes and the visualization of philosophy in Christianity.*

The report is devoted to the consideration of the image of the philosopher, primarily phenomenal, visually perceived, aesthetic, by Diogenes Laertes and its comparison with the method of visualization and personalization of philosophy in Christianity, primarily in the visual and pictorial form of depicting ancient and medieval philosophers in Orthodox churches. The report aims to show the productive possibilities of using visual anthropological analysis for historical and philosophical research in general and for understanding individual specific philosophers in particular.

Keywords: The image of a philosopher, Diogenes Laertes, visual anthropology and aesthetics, Christianity, Orthodox church

Diogenes Laertes is still one of the main sources on the history of ancient philosophy. It seems that it is of great interest to consider the history of ancient philosophy from the visual-anthropological and aesthetic-anthropological points of view. As applied to our author, this means the study of how the "image" of the philosopher was presented in his work, to what extent his phenomenal "idea" and "eidos" embodied the specifics of the thought of this or that philosopher. A lot of plastic images of ancient philosophers have survived to our time (we have collected them on the site https://iconsphilosophy.ucoz.ru), but it is important to study how this image was formed and modeled in the narrative, with the help of linguistic discourse, and to reveal its features. We will compare the ancient way of positing the image of a philosopher with the way of creating a visual image of a philosopher (mostly ancient, although we will also turn to such Christian thinkers as, for example, St. Gregory Palamas) in Christianity, in which one can find a special practice of visualization, personalization, and even where a mystification of philosophy. It is very important here to present the ontologization of the visual image as grounded by the energies emanating from the personality and manifesting its deep personal essence. We will refer to the material we have collected on the images of ancient philosophers in Orthodox churches in Russia, Greece, Romania and other countries (presented on the project website at: https://philosophchurch.wordpress.com), summarizing the main results of research in this area and starting from from them for the development of the fundamental aesthetics of the human image, which makes it possible to productively develop the semantic possibilities of philosophical and visual anthropology in the conditions of the modern world.

* This study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), project number 20‐011‐00385a: “The iconography of ancient and medieval philosophers in Orthodox churches: the specificity of the visual representation of man in Russian culture”