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Today's episode, Istanbul, not Constantinople, the later Orthodox tradition.

Say what you will about Byzantine philosophy, but at least it has a nice clear end point.

So often we've struggled with the problem of how to demarcate chronological periods. In the Latin

West, the line between medieval and renaissance philosophy is as fuzzy as a kitten emerging from a tumble

dryer.

And we've seen how late ancient philosophy merges fairly seamlessly into medieval philosophy in different languages,

with the texts and preoccupations of pagan and Christian thinkers alike being passed on to the Latin philosophy. and like John Philoponus or the Capidocian fathers being classified as late ancient thinkers or as Byzantine

thinkers depending which scholar is doing the classifying.

At the tail end though we can even name a specific day when the curtain fell on Byzantine philosophy,

May 29, 1453, when the Ottomans breached the walls of Constantinople and finally ended the Roman Empire.

And yet.

The Ottomans had no interest in exterminating Greek Orthodox Christianity, and their arrival did not

make it wholly impossible for Greek speakers to engage in scholarships.

If we think in terms of philosophy and eastern Christian cultures, rather than restricting our attention

only to Byzantine, we can actually see the fall of the capital as a beginning rather than an end.

A new phase of Greek scholarship begins, in which Orthodox theologians and philosophers live under Islamic rule,

much as their counterparts in the Syrian church had been doing for centuries.

Think not of Plithon, who died just about the time that Byzantine ended, but of his enemy,

Scolarius. Once Constantinople got the that Byzantine

...