Philo of Alexandria - Books and Journals

204 part two
continuity and discontinuity with earlier Christian thinking, and his orthodoxy.
Philo appears primarily in Chapter 2 (‘Theophany as Light’), which includes
Clement’s revision of the Philonic idea of Abram’s conversion, Philo’s notion of
the eternal Day, an Aristotelian background for his idea of illumination, and his
ontology of light. (EB)
20223. N.G.Cohen,‘ContextandConnotation.GreekWordsfor
Jewish Concepts in Philo,’ in J. L. Kugel (ed.), Shem in the Tents of
Japheth: Essays on the Encounter of Judaism and Hellenism, Supplements
to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 74 (Leiden 2002) 31–61.
The author aims to show that in the case of several rather common Greek
words, Philo found a Judeo-Greek connotation (related to their general connotation,
but not the same) ready to hand. The terms discussed are νμς and
νμεσία (= Torah), παράδσις (= ancestral traditions), δγμα (= rule), δικαι-
σνη (= faithful adherence to Torah statutes), and most extensively σία and
λγς (= Torah). The author goes on to argue that these Judeo-Greek terms were
once again redefined by early Christianity and these re-definitions were accepted
by scholars as their primary connotation. This explains why they have so often
been misconstrued by Philonic scholars. (HMK)
20224. I. Davidzon, ‘Il deserto nel De Vita Mosis di Filone Alessandrino:
possibilità di un’ascesa etica e conoscitiva attraverso i prodigi,’
Materia guidaica 7 (2002) 67–73.
The article deals with the meaning of the desert as seen in Philo’s Mos. It
intends to show how the desert is not only a physical place but offers to human
beings the possibility of rising to God. In this treatise there is a strict relationship
between the desert, suffering and divine intervention. In this context
manna is the link between human beings and God. The human path towards
God starts with the sufferings and the deprivations inflicted by the desert, but
finally humans reach the contemplation of nature and the knowledge of God
through the wonder of manna as divine manifestation. (DTR; based on author’s
summary)
20225. D.M.DeSouza–Filho,‘TheMaker’sKnowledgePrinciple
and the Limits of Science,’ Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 76 (2002) 229–237.
In modern philosophy, the ‘maker’s knowledge argument’ denotes that people
can know what they make. The argument can be construed positively—that
people can indeed know what they make—or negatively—that people can know
only what they make. This understanding of human knowledge has implications
for the definition of ‘scientific knowledge, which is thus separated from speculative
metaphysics and purely theoretical knowledge’ (p. 232). Although it is
widely assumed that the maker’s knowledge argument is not found in ancient