Biography

George Karamanolis is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He works primarily on ancient philosophy while maintaining research interests in Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. His publications include the monographs, "Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry" (Oxford, 2006; revised paperback 2013), "The Philosophy of Early Christianity" (London/Durham, 2013; revised 2nd edition London 2021), the edited volumes "Studies on Porphyry" with Anne Sheppard (London, 2007), "The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy" with Vasilis Politis (Cambridge, 2018; paperback 2019) and "Introduction to Ancient Philosophy" (Crete University Press, 2017). He has also published papers on Aristotle’s ethics, on Aristotle’s logic, on Cicero’s ethics, on Porphyry, and on early Christian Philosophy. Currently, he leads a project on a new edition with commentary of the Magna Moralia.

Project Abstract

There is a distinct cosmological view maintained by philosophers in late antiquity, that God created the world all at once. Porphyry, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa likewise argue that this was the case, using the term ἀθρόως, τὸ ἀθρόον to indicate a) that the world has come into being without any time elapsing and outside of time, and b) that everything in the world has come into being simultaneously. I wish to pursue the question of how we should understand timeless, non-synchronic, simultaneity with respect to creation from the point of ancient metaphysics and how this would make sense from the point of view of modern physics. This kind of simultaneity is not only timeless in the sense of implying that no time has elapsed – since it pertains to events happening outside of time – but it demarcates certain timeless metaphysical relations, between form and matter and between God and the world. This gives rise to further questions, such as whether matter can be informed all at once, whether an event realized in the sensible world can possibly be timeless even when the agent responsible for it is acting outside time, and whether there can be an efficient cause co-eternal with its effect.

Selected Publications

2024. "Porphyry’s Conception of Matter." In Porphyry in Syriac. The Treatise ›On Principles and Matter‹ and its Place in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac Philosophical Traditions, edited by Yury Arzhanov, 137-150. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111388168-008. 

2021. The Philosophy of Early Christianity, London: Routledge (2nd ed.). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429052804.

2021. "Creation in Early Christianity." In The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy, edited by Mark Edwards, 55-67. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315543512.  

2020, editors with Pavel Gregorić. Pseudo-Aristotle: De Mundo (On the Cosmos) A Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108876964.

2020. "Does Plato Advance a Bundle Theory in the Timaeus?." In Plato’s Timaeus. Proceedings of the Tenth Symposium Platonicum Pragense, edited by Chad Jorgenson, Filip Karfík and Štěpán Špinka, 149-168. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004437081_009.