The path to the philosophical chapters of “Svyatoslav’s Izbornik” of 1073 (The division of beings by Alexandrian philosophers)

Abstract

The main content of “Svyatoslav’s Izbornik” of 1073 is the examination of theological issues, but it also includes chapters dedicated to philosophy. Among the most interesting are the chapters containing the “Preparations” by Theodore of Raithu: through them, the terminological apparatus and the problems of medieval philosophy enter Russian culture. Thus, the crucial question of medieval thought – the dialectic of essence and hypostasis – turns out to be the core question of the philosophical chapters of the “Izbornik”. This question, like the other philosophical issues, is not resolved but merely posed in the philosophical chapters; yet the very posing of a philosophical question is already an immutable historical fact. The dialectic of essence and hypostasis is one of the nodes of the “neo-patristic synthesis”, expressing both the substance of ancient Greek philosophy and the reality of the Christian faith. A straightforward examination of this dialectic by means of historical and philosophical analysis requires the discovery of the links connecting the Aristotelian doctrine of essence with the patristic doctrine of hypostasis. One of these links is the corpus of Alexandrian Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle’s “Categories” from the turn of the 5^th–6^th centuries. For the first time, we publish a translation of John Philoponus’s classical commentary on the statement from the second chapter of Aristotle’s “Categories”: “Of things that exist, some are said of a subject but are not in any subject...”. The comprehensive analysis of the published fragment offers a valuable insight into how Aristotle’s fundamental doctrine was understood in the works of the philosophers of the Alexandrian school.