Looking Through the Past
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m trying to post occasional midweek pieces on historical topics to supplement the usual Sunday newsletter. Here’s the latest!
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Porphyry was a Greco-Roman philosopher who expanded on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Like a lot of ancient philosophers, he wrote about all kinds of stuff: vegetarianism, epic poetry, why Christians should be executed. But he’s probably most famous for writing the Isagoge, a text about logic that became standard in the medieval Muslim and Christian worlds.
In the Isagoge, Porphyry explains his method for sorting everything on earth into tidy categories. The medieval translators of his work diagrammed it like this:
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