Most Famous Byzantine Philosophers
Byzantine philosophy is the philosophical tradition of the Eastern Roman Empire, sustained for nearly a thousand years between the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Its philosophers preserved and commented on the Platonic and Aristotelian texts when these had been lost in the Latin West, integrating them with Christian theology in a tradition distinct from both medieval Latin scholasticism and the Islamic falsafa. Major figures include Photios I, the patriarch and polymath whose Bibliotheca preserved much ancient learning; Michael Psellos, who revived Platonic study in the eleventh century; John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent remains central to Eastern Christian spirituality; and Gemistus Pletho, whose Plethonic revival in the fifteenth century helped seed the Italian Renaissance.
Byzantine thought is the bridge between late ancient and Renaissance philosophy, and its preservation work made the Greek text-base of European thought possible. The thinkers below shaped the Eastern Christian intellectual tradition over more than a millennium.
Byzantine philosophers
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John Climacus
John Climacus, also known as John of the Ladder, was a Byzantine Christian monk and philosopher of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, abbot of the monastery of Saint Ca...
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Photios I
Photios I, called the Great, was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and twice Patriarch of Constantinople, the most learned man of ninth-century Byzantium and one of the princ...
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Gemistus Pletho
George Gemistos, who took the name Plethon to recall his master Plato, was a late-Byzantine philosopher of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the most original Platonist of...
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John Italos
John Italos was a Byzantine philosopher of the eleventh century, born in southern Italy of Norman parents, who studied in Constantinople under Michael Psellos and succeeded him ...
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Mark Eugenikos
Mark Eugenikos was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, and Metropolitan of Ephesus, who attended the Council of Florence of 1438-39 as the principal philosophical and theologic...
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Michael Psellos
Michael Psellos was a Byzantine philosopher, statesman, and historian, the leading intellectual of eleventh-century Constantinople, and the principal figure in the Platonist rev...
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Theodore Metochites
Theodore Metochites was a Byzantine philosopher, theologian, statesman, and poet of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the prime minister of the emperor Androniko...