Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Contemporary Receptions and Future Prospects among Historians of Philosophy In: The Reception of Philo of Alexandria. Edited by: Courtney J. P. Friesen, David Lincicum, and David T. Runia, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198836223.003.0033 32 Contemporary Receptions and Future Prospects among Historians of Philosophy Gretchen Reydams-Schils Recent events suggest that research on Philo’s position in the history of philosophy is going strong: in May 2019 Michael Cover and Lutz Doering organized an international conference on “Philo and Philosophical Discourse,” the contributions of which will be published as a collection of essays. To give some examples, in Trascendenza e Cambiamento in Filone di Alessandria: La Chiave del Paradosso (2019) 1 with Brepols in the series Monothéismes et Philosophie, Francesca Simeoni examines the role of paradoxes in Philo’s thinking. And in her monograph Virtue and Law in Plato and Beyond (2017), 2 Julia Annas devotes a chapter to Philo of Alexandria. So where do we stand now on the questions of Philo’s relation to the ancient philosophical tradition and his place in research in the history of philosophy, and especially in that strand of Platonism commonly referred to as Middle Platonism? Philo remains a very rich and rewarding author, who keeps pushing back against overly narrow conceptions of phil- osophy on the part of his readers and interpreters. 32.1 Overview of Scholarship With John Dillon’s inclusion of Philo in his groundbreaking overview of Middle Platonism, 3 David Runia’s magisterial study of the importance of Plato’s Timaeus for Philo’s worldview, 4 and the issue of the Studia Philonica Annual containing contribu- tions by Gregory Sterling and David Runia and responses by David Winston, Thomas Tobin, and John Dillon on the question of whether Philo can be considered a Middle Platonist, 5 Philo became the subject of renewed interest by scholars of the history of an- cient philosophy. 6 Sterling compares Philo’s method of reading Scripture to the stances 1 F. Simeoni, Trascendenza e Cambiamento in Filone di Alessandria: La Chiave del Paradosso, MON 25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). 2 J. Annas, Virtue and Law in Plato and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3 J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists (80 B.C. to A .D. 220) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). 4 D. T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato, PhA 44 (Leiden: Brill, 1986). 5 SPhiloA 5 (1993). 6 In this contribution I focus on Philo’s reception among scholars working more broadly on the history of an- cient philosophy. But a number of Philo scholars such as F. Calabi (see e.g. God’s Acting, Man’s Acting: Tradition and Philosophy in Philo of Alexandria [Leiden: Brill, 2008]), D. Winston (e.g. Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Aug 15 2024, NEWGEN C32 C32P1 C32S1 C32P2 /12_first_proofs/first_proofs/xml_for_typesetting oso-9780198836223-part-6.indd 532 oso-9780198836223-part-6.indd 532 15-Aug-24 10:52:26 15-Aug-24 10:52:26