The essays in this volume celebrate the unusual career and the remarkable accomplishments of Paul (Pavlos) Kalligas, our dear colleague and friend who sadly passed away on 23 July 2025. Collectively, they focus on ‘the Platonic Tradition’, to the scholarly study of which Kalligas’ contribution has been invaluable. He has demonstrated, in admirable fashion, that, far from being a fixed or monolithic category, it is a tradition that should be understood, as Plato’s most famous student would have said, ‘in many senses’.
We would suggest that Platonism, in the ancient Greek and Roman world, appears in three distinct guises. There is, first, the institutional Platonism of the philosophers who were members of the Academy, including, of course, Plato himself and Aristotle. In addition, then, to the essays that address Plato directly, it is no surprise that some of the contributors to this collection are concerned with aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy and his relation to Plato. Institutional Platonism, which lasted for about three centuries, must be distinguished from another version, which can be described as ‘dogmatic’, and includes philosophers who, while not being part of the Academy, saw themselves as the heirs of Plato’s teachings and regarded him as an authoritative, almost infallible figure. Plotinus is, of course, the most illustrious ancient representative of this kind of Platonism and is, reasonably enough, the protagonist of this collection. There is, finally, what we might call an ‘inspirational’ Platonism, which includes philosophers who drew inspiration from Plato’s works without necessarily adhering to a unified tradition or viewing Plato as an infallible authority. Even some of Plato’s opponents, such as the Stoics, belong here, since several of their central views derive from Plato. Stoic providentialism, for example, is directly inspired by the Timaeus and, above all, the Stoics, particularly though by no means exclusively Epictetus, acknowledge that their ethics is inspired by and preserves the core of the ethical model provided by Plato’s Socrates.
The boundaries of inspirational Platonism can of course be extended almost indefinitely. This is shown by the chapter in this collection devoted to the Epicurean account of intentional action. In fact, the very issue at stake would not have been a problem, where it not for the determinism of the Stoics which derives in part from their own reading of Plato. And, as Kalligas has masterfully shown, the Epicurean view is part of Plotinus’ background in developing his own view of human action. Finally, one chapter delves into what we could call the prehistory of Platonism, since it traces key aspects of the history and emergence of universals: a concept first theorized by Plato’s Socrates, central to Plato’s philosophy to the very end, and also crucial for many aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy. Collectively, the essays in this volume address almost the whole of ancient Greek philosophy, from its origins in archaic Greece to the fifth century of our era. The vast intellectual extent of these essays is matched by the geographical range of their provenance. Their authors represent eleven different countries, from Greece to Australia by way of Norway, to mention a few. They reflect the extraordinary breadth of Kalligas’ own approach to Greek philosophical thought and the international recognition his work has has received. We would especially like to mention Suzanne Stern-Gillet, who worked on her contribution in extremely adverse conditions and who sadly did not live to see this volume published.
Kalligas’ central philosophical focus has been the philosophy of Plotinus. The resurgence of interest in, and scholarship on Kalligas’ work during the last thirty years is due, in no small part, to his important papers, his active role in various international symposia and conferences, and, most of all, to his monumental edition, translation into modern Greek, and commentary on the Enneads and Plotinus’ thought. The commentary on Enneads I–V has already appeared in English; Ennead VI is due to be published in the near future.
Kalligas came to Plotinus in a roundabout way. Having become interested in 19th-century German philosophy, as he once said, he was surprised to see how important Plato was to the authors he was reading, and began to look for the source of the picture of Plato’s views they all more or less shared. Going backward, he finally determined that the Idealist interpretation of Plato was deeply influenced by Plotinus’ systematic exposition of Platonism during the 3rd century of our era. But the end of his search was actually the beginning of an intellectual quest that occupied him for close to the next forty years. His first English paper, already the product of long preparation, on issues with the text of the Enneads, appeared in 1988. The first of the (appropriately enough!) nine volumes of his edition and commentary was published in 1991; the last came out in 2019, twenty-eight years later. It is really the work of a lifetime.
Plotinus’ thought can be abstruse and his language is often gnarly and opaque. To come to terms with it, Kalligas spent years studying the thought and works of the Neoplatonists, both Plotinus’ immediate predecessors, especially his teacher, Ammonius Saccas, and those who followed him, like Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus as well as the Hermetic literature and the Gnostic dogma, for which Plotinus had no patience. But the knowledge of Plotinus’ proximate philosophical and cultural context proved to be not nearly enough for understanding him. Plotinus writes against the background of an eight-century-old philosophical tradition of which he is, and considers himself to be, an integral part. He is committed to the truth of Plato’s views, as he interprets them, and he defends them against any objection (particularly Aristotle’s), explicit or implicit, that can be made against them on the basis of any view that is part of that tradition. In order, then, to understand Plotinus, Kalligas found it necessary to know as much of that tradition as we can—although, since so few of the works that were available to him have survived to our day, that is necessarily very little. And it is necessary to know it well in order to recognize the target, and hence the nature, of Plotinus’ arguments, since in addition to the obscurity of his diction he makes a habit of not naming those whose views he is examining.
To that end, Kalligas developed an encyclopedic understanding of the complete span of Greek philosophical thought. He was as much at ease with Plato and the Presocratics as he was with St. Basil and Proclus, and he mastered the complex textual, linguistic, and philological skills that the close study of an ancient work requires. Moreover, aware as he was that philosophy is one human practice among others with which it sometimes interacts, he learnt enough about the ancients to be able to show the connections—when such connections exist—between the questions of philosophy and related developments in, say, mathematics, science, politics, or religion.
In celebrating Kalligas’ accomplishments, we must also remember the unusual road that he took to reach them—a road on which, perhaps in more than one sense, he was often alone. He never studied Philosophy or Classics. He received a degree in Law from the University of Athens but never followed up on it. Withdrawing to his magnificent library, he turned to Plotinus and, for about forty years, he worked alone, steeping himself in his work and its broad philosophical and historical context until, on the strength of his publications, he was retroactively awarded a doctorate in Philosophy, and joined the faculty of the University of Athens, from which he retired in 2016.
One of the reasons for devoting himself to the Enneads, Kalligas once said, was that ‘there is a need for this work to be done’. He saw his task not only as a massive intellectual challenge but also as an ethical obligation, which he discharged systematically, producing volume after volume with an uncanny regularity, undeterred by complications and impervious to distractions any one of which would have been enough to derail most of the rest of us. At the same time, he also produced outstanding work on doxography, history, rhetoric, aesthetics, poetry, and prose without ever losing sight of his most important goal.
Once the Plotinus project was complete, Kalligas, whose mastery of language was prodigious, turned to the translation of Plato, Plotinus’ inspiration as well as his own. Beginning in 2019, he translated into Modern Greek, with introductions and notes, the Gorgias, the Meno, the Laches, the Parmenides, and the Theaetetus—and he was working on the complex divisions and obscure arguments of the Sophist until shortly before his death.
Translation, in theory and practice, was important to him. In addition to Plato and Plotinus, he also translated into Modern Greek the poetry of St. John of the Cross and Proclus’ Hymns, Ibn Tufail’s 12th-century eclectic philosophical novel and several contemporary philosophical writings, including Gregory Vlastos’ Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. His translations are without exception unusually smooth and idiomatic. In particular, they serve Plato well because, unlike most others, they preserve the extraordinary range of his linguistic sensibility. They are true both to the elevated, almost hieratic language he uses to communicate his vision of philosophy and to the lively everydayness, the broad comedy, of his diction in some of his accounts of the encounters the dialogues represent.
Kalligas’ scholarly work was not his only contribution to the international renewal of interest in Plotinus and Neoplatonism. He was an active participant in many international conferences, several of which he organized himself, and he taught at such centers for the study of Greek philosophy as Oxford and Princeton. In Greece, the preeminence of the study of Ancient Philosophy among the various philosophical fields owes much to his scholarship, teaching, and advising; to the leading figures in the field who visited Greece from abroad as his formal or informal guests; and, most of all, to the open weekly extra-curricular seminar, focused on the close reading of a variety of ancient texts, that he and Vasilis Karasmanis offered for students, faculty, and independent scholars for at least the last thirty-five years.
Whether it was a cause or a result of his living with Plotinus as long as he did, Kalligas demonstrated an affinity for Plotinus’ esotericism, his introspective turn, and his need for solitude. His courtesy and moral seriousness provoked in his contemporaries something like the admiration, even perhaps the sort of reverence, that Plotinus seems to have inspired in his. And, like Plotinus, only a little more so, he was firmly anchored in the everyday.
In the very first sentence of his biography of his teacher, Porphyry charges that ‘Plotinus seemed to be ashamed of having a body’. Kalligas’ Plotinus is more worldly. Contrary to the Gnostics, he never dismissed the sensible world, which includes the body, as inherently bad. Goodness reaches, in different degrees, every corner of the universe. It is not body, or matter, alone that is dangerous to the soul: ‘It is only’, Kalligas writes, ‘the soul’s involvement and concern for a particular body that may, if it is pursued single-mindedly, force the soul into an emotional entanglement with it and lead it to share in its condition, either in the form of pleasure, anguish, or pain’.
Philosophy was an immense part of Kalligas’ life. And so was music, which he loved only as a trained musician, who understands it profoundly, could. He also loved film, poetry—and swimming. He had a wicked sense of humor, could always enjoy a good meal, and was a highly accomplished fisherman, as handy with a line as he was with a spear-gun. Above all, however, he was a wonderful interlocutor, a dedicated teacher, and a true and loyal friend. He was all that and more to everyone who has contributed to this volume, and to many others besides. It is for his courtesy, his generosity, and his friendship, in addition to his invaluable contributions to our understanding of Greek thought, that we dedicate this volume, with gratitude and admiration, to the memory of Paul Kalligas.
The Editors