Hypatia of Alexandria

Josh Landy
Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?

Ray Briggs
What was so revolutionary about her ideas?

Josh Landy
And why did they lead to her eventual murder?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers’ corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy and direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today it’s the first episode in our new series, “Wise Women,” generously funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’ll be talking about the life and thought of Hypatia of Alexandria.

Josh Landy
In her time in the fourth century, Hypatia was one of the most famous philosophers in Alexandria and indeed in the ancient world. She studied so many different things: mathematics, astronomy, philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and she taught about them too. Under her leadership the Alexandrian school was really prestigious, right up there with the Academy of Athens. People came from far and wide to study there. And they were from all different religions too. Some of them were Christians, some of them were pagans like her. Everybody loved her.

Josh Landy
Well, not everybody—she did end up murdered by a mob of Christian extremists.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, she was killed for her philosophical beliefs, and particularly for her Neo-Platonism.

Josh Landy
Right, that was a system of beliefs developed by people like Plotinus. It said that the divine force at the heart of the universe is this thing called “the One.” It’s purely intellectual, and it’s also where our souls ultimately come from. Hypatia, thought we could get closer to the one by living lives of contemplation.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it’s such an interesting idea and pretty inoffensive too. Why on earth would Christians have a problem with it?

Josh Landy
Well, there was a rival version of Neoplatonism that was much more at odds with Christianity, and that version emphasized rituals, including animal sacrifice. Christians drew the line at sacrificing an animal to pagan gods.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but that wasn’t Hypatia’s fault. Her version of Neoplatonism wasn’t even big on rituals. It was more about cultivating virtues—the kinds that allow you to transcend the physical and experience the one.

Josh Landy
You’re right, it was totally unfair. She got targeted by a guy named Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, who wanted to take down the Roman governor Orestes, and Hypatia was a friend and advisor to Orestes. So, Cyril started spreading these vicious rumors about her and those rumors eventually got her killed. But nothing she believed was especially hostile to Christianity.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s true. You know, in fact, many of her students were Christians, like Synesius, who wrote a series of hymns that kind of seemed to bring together Neoplatonism and Christianity. He described the divine as having these three different aspects—one heavenly, one angelic, and one earthly. It’s just like the Christian Trinity.

Josh Landy
That is totally fascinating. And Hypatia was obviously a really powerful intellectual figure. It’s an incredible shame that she got cut down in her prime. She had a unified philosophical system, she knew a ton of math in astronomy, and she ran one of the most prestigious schools in the ancient world.

Ray Briggs
And she accomplished all that as a woman in a male dominated field. She’s remained an inspiration to female philosophers throughout the ages. There’s even a journal named after her.

Josh Landy
That’s true, but don’t forget that she wasn’t alone. Petrosian Alexandria, Sosipatram of Pergamon, Asclepigenia of Athens—there were tons of prominent female philosophers at that point in history.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, why don’t we hear more about them? It’s true, there’s now a movie about Hypatia, but she’s still not a household name like Plato or Aristotle.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s what we’re doing this series on wise women. We’ll be celebrating 16 unsung heroines of philosophy from Hypatia in the 4th century to Judith Jarvis Thompson in the 20th and 21st.

Ray Briggs
Their philosophy has sometimes been overlooked and often underrated.

Josh Landy
But not around here!

Ray Briggs
Amen to that. I’m excited to kick things off with Hypatia. In a minute we’ll be joined by Edward Watts, Professor of History at UC San Diego and author of “Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher.”

Josh Landy
But first, We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Angela Johnston, to find out more about the life and times of Hypatia. She files this report.

Angela Johnston
In one of the final episodes of the popular TV show The Good Place, a group of friends finally make sit somewhere they’ve been trying to get to for four seasons. They’re at a party, one of the characters spots his idol from across the room.

The Good Place
“Are you are you Hypatia of Alexandria? Yep. How’s it hanging? Really well! I gotta say, I was expecting you to be still, you know, ancient Greek. Oh well, we sort of stay current in this place.”

Angela Johnston
In this scene, Hypatia is played by actress Lisa Kudrow—Phoebe from Friends—and she’s decked out in a Jacksonville Jaguars jersey with HYPATIA spelled in big white letters on her back. Spoiler alert: she is apparently the only famous philosopher to make it into the so-called heaven. Plato? Slavery. Socrates? Too annoying (a loud chewer)…

The Good Place
Also, is it Hypatia or hypoxia? Or in the ancient Greek, who put to you—there’s a lot of fun debate about this. You know what, just call me Patty.

Alex Petkas
“Hypatia was a really extraordinary woman.”

Angela Johnston
That’s Alex Petkas, a former classics professor and current podcast host.

Alex Petkas
She didn’t just teach philosophy. She didn’t just teach people math and astronomy, which were part of philosophy at the time. But she actually manage to get into a position of leadership in her city, which is one of the great cities of the ancient world, Alexandria, which is in Egypt.

Angela Johnston
When Hypatia was born in the middle of the 4th century, Alexandria was the second largest city in the world after Rome. It was bustling and diverse.

Alex Petkas

You have Jews and Christians and pagans and Scythians and Egyptians and Romans and big business interests of organized crime.

Angela Johnston
Hypatia got into teaching and philosophy through her father, a mathematician and philosopher named Theon. She apprenticed alongside him as he was teaching his students Euclid series of geometry. And at some point, Hypatia’s dad decided those current textbooks weren’t good enough.

Alex Petkas

Theon said, “I’m gonna make a new edition of Euclid.” And he brings in Hypatia to help him draw the diagrams, and when they finished the work, she gets to put her name on it. So, they co-authored this.

Angela Johnston
She eventually takes over the school and begins teaching students herself. But it turns out there aren’t many other documents or texts by Hypatia that still exist. Scholars like Petkas have to reconstruct a lot of her life from her students’ writings and letters.

Alex Petkas
I did a lot of research on one student in particular, a guy named Synesius of Cyrene.

Angela Johnston
Synesius also shows up on the Hollywood screen, where he has a minor part in the 2009 movie about Hypatia, “Agora.”

Agora
“What mysterious wonder do you all think might be lurking beneath the Earth that would make every single person and animal and object and slave settle they’re so nice. Synesius? Their weightiness.”

Angela Johnston
In this scene Synesius is in a classroom where Hypatia is teaching a roomful of men of all different religions. Synesius is Christian, Hypatia is pagan. Outside the classroom walls, the religious battle between the two groups is violently heating up. But under Hypatia is lectures, it seems to be cast aside.

Agora
“Synesius, what is Euclid’s first rule? If two things are equal to a third thing, then they are all equal to each other. Good. Now, are you both not similar to me? Yes. And you, Orestes? Yes. Now, I am actually saying this to everybody here in this room, more things unites us than divides us.”

Angela Johnston
Near the time of her death, Hypatia was an intimate adviser to the Roman governor arrestees, and religious tensions were at an all-time high.

Alex Petkas
The Roman governor has this job of, like, how do I calm the seas? And we don’t know exactly what sort of things she said to him. But the fact that she was there saying them, it comes out clearly from our sources, both on what hurt her life was like and also why she kind of became a threat to the bishop and why she had to go.

Angela Johnston
Hypatia didn’t want violence. Neither did Orestes. But the new Christian bishop Cyril wanted to stir things up.

Alex Petkas
You start to look around if you’re kind of average Christian citizen of Alexandria, like oh, there’s a witch.

Angela Johnston
Petkas says the bishop didn’t call a hit, but his supporters thought he’d be happy about it. Her murder was brutal.

Alex Petkas
She gets pulled from her carriage in the street as she’s on her way home one day by supporters of Cyril and this just was shock and horror throughout the Christian world—”that’s not how we do business.” And yet it’s kind of gone down to their shame ever since.

Angela Johnston
After her death, it said that Alexandria wasn’t the same. But Hypatia’s legacy as an influential woman who questioned everything has lasted for more than a millennium.

Agora
“I believe in philosophy.”

Angela Johnston
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that super informative report, Angela. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re talking about the life and thought Hypatia of Alexandria.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Edward watts. He’s Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. Ed, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Edward Watts
Thanks so much. I’m really glad to be here.

Josh Landy
So Ed, you’ve written an excellent book about Hypatia, What first got you interested in her life and philosophy?

Edward Watts
I think the feature that particularly attracted her to me is biographical. My mother and my daughter are both women who are interested in science and STEM. And my mother got her PhD in the late 1960s and struggled to find a place in a male dominated environment where she really could practice and think and create in a way that was true to her own ambitions and her own interests.

Ray Briggs
So Hypatia managed to really succeed in the male dominated field of philosophy. Can you tell us about what you think her most significant contributions were?

Speaker 9
So I think the most important thing about Hypatia is to step back just a little bit and understand what Alexandria and philosophy was like when Hypatia was born. She was born to one of the most prominent mathematicians and philosophers and Alexandria, one of the last known members of the Alexandria Museum, and also a figure who had dominated philosophical interpretation in this very rich and very well-established tradition. That was privileging mathematics in its study of philosophy. And so, there were two real ways to approach the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in antiquity. One of them said that mathematics is a tool to try to model the understanding of higher philosophical concepts. And this is something that, you know, the Plato, for example, would ascribe to. The Alexandrians believe something different. They believe that the mathematical concepts represent a pure embodiment of concepts like justice. And so, numbers would equate with philosophical concepts in a way that they saw is more precise. And this was the Alexandrian way of teaching philosophy in the fourth century. And it’s the tradition that Hypatia was brought up in, and Hypatia’s greatest contribution in that context is she convinced her father who was the leading philosopher of this particular approach, that his approach was wrong. And she flipped Alexandria from an environment where mathematics dominated what we would consider sort of higher-level philosophy to one where they acknowledged that the concepts that Plato had put forward were superior to mathematical concepts expressed the numbers.

Ray Briggs
That’s really fascinating, but I understand is not Hypatia is only contribution. What else did she do?

Speaker 9
The other thing that Hypatia does that is really quite remarkable is she believes that philosophy must be practiced in a public fashion. And so, she sees her role as a philosopher as one that is both about individual and personal contemplation, understanding of texts, but also working in her world to make everyone more philosophical, to the degree that they’re capable. And so that means teaching students on high level philosophical topics. It also means advising regular people and gauging the degree to which they can implement philosophical ideas in their own lives. But Hypatia genuinely believed that it was her role as a philosopher to manifest and express public virtues in a way that made her city more philosophical.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Hypatia of Alexandria with Edward Watts from UC San Diego.

Ray Briggs
How did a pagan woman become such a powerful figure in a predominantly Christian city? What can we learn from Hypatia about leading a virtuous life? And how can her example inspire us to take charge of our own narratives? Even in the face of adversity?

Josh Landy
Intellect, virtue, and courage—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Finn Brothers
Soul, where is my soul? Where is my soul?

Josh Landy
If you want to find the soul, maybe look into the One—at least according to Neoplatonists like Hypatia. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Hypatia of Alexandria with Edward Watts from UC San Diego. It’s the first episode in our new series, “Wise Women,” generously funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Josh Landy
Got questions about Hypatia and her philosophical world? Email us: comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and get wise to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Ed, you were just telling us about Hypatia is teaching and kind of outreach. Alexandria was a really big and diverse city, and she taught a lot of different kinds of people. How did she make Neoplatonic philosophy relevant to all of them?

Edward Watts
This is a really great question. And I think, to understand why it’s so important, we have to understand what Alexandria is like Alexandria is a city of perhaps 500,000 people. But it’s an incredibly dense city, you know, it is on just sort of a limestone plateau almost that surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the north, and a massive freshwater lake on the south. And so, Alexandria is a city that has lots and lots of different religions, ethnic groups, languages, and it’s a city that is also full of people who are coming in and out of the city regularly for business. And what Hypatia understood is that as a philosopher in this incredibly diverse place, it’s her role to make sure that she is available to and accessible to everybody who can potentially benefit from her teaching. And so, we know that Hypatia received visitors who would come to her house in the morning, and she would interact with them, give them advice, help them if she could. But this was always directed in such a way where she would get these people closer to what she believed to be the appropriate way to behave as her philosophical system dictated, these were regular people. And so, their ability to interact with philosophical ideas is somewhat limited. And Plotinus acknowledge this, you know that if you are interacting as a leader, making your society more philosophical, you have to gauge those interventions in such a way that people can respond to them. But I pay she was also a teacher. And so Hypatia led a philosophical circle that had both regular students who would come in and take some classes, and then initiates who were really bought wholly into the philosophical system. And for those initiates, the philosophical world that Hypatia lead was a family. So, when we see their work describing the community they belong in, they talk about Hypatia, as their mother, the mother of their soul, in essence, and their brothers and sisters in this world are their fellow students. And so we can understand Hypatia, working in this Alexandrian space, in a way that’s calibrated to interact with everybody on the level where they can most be affected by her ideas.

Josh Landy
So it sounds like it’s a least a two tier kind of system, where you have a kind of broader outreach to the general public, and then maybe, you know, higher level, I don’t know pro-classes, AP classes, or whatever you want to call them. For folks who are really into it, and, you know, this may be makes it might sound, I don’t know, higher, hierarchical, on the other hand, since this really is a philosophy of life, and people are supposed to change their life on the basis of it, maybe, maybe that makes sense. It’s too dangerous, perhaps to, to ask people to change their life, if they don’t fully understand what you’re saying to them. But it raises another question for me, which is, How broad is the outreach? So for example, did she charge money? Did you have to have money to get in? Did you have to have prior preparation? Were there female students? How broad is the is the demographic here.

Edward Watts
So the teaching of philosophy in principle is not supposed to be something that is fee based. This goes back to Socrates, who distinguished himself from the Sophists by not charging money for his instruction. In later, later centuries, and Alexandria. We know they did charge fees, but it was optional, right? You would have examples from philosophical texts, where we have the transcript of a teacher coming into a classroom and saying, Yeah, I know, you’re not supposed to be charging money. But if you really like what kind of instruction you’re getting, you should like tip me, you know, philosophy by like suggested donation exactly by passive aggressive kind of suggestion. And in Hypatia’s case, we don’t know that she ever charged. It’s, I think, very likely that Hypatia is the inheritor of her father’s school, and that school was probably publicly funded to some degree. But what that means, I think, you had mentioned that this looks like a two-tier system. I think we actually have to imagine this is like maybe a seven-tier system. Where you have, you know, regular people who are only capable of being told do this don’t do that they aren’t capable of understanding why you’re telling them this; then you have people who are responsive to philosophy but they aren’t exactly students of it. So, the governor, arrestees would be a good example of this, where he is responsive to philosophy you know, he, he trusts that she is giving him good advice, because it’s philosophically inspired. But he’s not sitting in any classroom. And then you have lower-level students who come to get some instruction. So, we know later, in the fifth century, Alexandria, there were students who were, for example, going to go to law school, but they decided to do the equivalent of like an MA in philosophy so they’d sit and do a year studying philosophy then then go off and become lawyers. So Hypatia is going to be dealing with people like that, but then she’s dealing with the people who actually have the capacity to understand philosophical ideas, want to use those ideas to structure their life, and they join a community that is a kind of community of the soul, where they devote themselves to figuring out how to practically live according to philosophy. And that’s kind of the highest level.

Ray Briggs
So Hypatia has all these ideas about how people are supposed to live their lives. How were you supposed to live your life, according to Hypatia?

Edward Watts
There’s a set of principles that you see laid out, that becomes in later Platonism, a kind of scale of virtues, that works all the way from the very basic kinds of physical virtues through things like political virtues, all the way up to kind of virtues that are supposed to purify your soul, so that you can come into a kind of union with the divine, and a patient is working off of a system like that. And what that means in practice, though, is you know, her initiates are getting instructed in that system. So, they understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re living in the way that you’re living. And they understand both the actions and the principles behind the actions. For other people what Hypatia is really going to be doing is just saying look like this is what I recommend we do, because it’s philosophically correct. And there’s a sense in her mind that, you know, these people ought to just trust her, you know, they can’t understand the Platonic texts. And we do have later Platonists who say, it’s dangerous, to instruct them in texts that they’re not capable of understanding. So I think what we what we should see with a patient is a set of instructions that guide you towards more just and virtuous behavior that are calibrated based upon what people are able to do.

Ray Briggs
I see and, and so does just and virtuous behavior kind of consist in studying a lot of math so that you get close to the One?

Edward Watts
So I think if you are in the school that Hypatia is leading, math as part of this, but it’s not the highest level thing that you’re doing. So, mathematics, and you know, and geometrical instruction, Plato even lays this out as a prerequisite for the higher-level understanding of the forms. And so in a Hypatia’s school, unlike in her father’s school, math would be something that would be understood as, like preparatory instruction, so that you can understand more abstract concepts as you move up the scale of virtues, and so in in later Platonism, and we think this is probably true to some degree in a patient school as well. There are texts that are specifically chosen to correlate with the particular type of virtue that you’re being instructed in, as a mathematical materials are lower level in a patient’s view instruction than say, reading the Timaeus, which would be a very high level instruction.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the life and thoughts of Hypatia of Alexandria with Edward Watts from UC San Diego. And we’ve got a question from a listener, Lisa in Pleasanton. Lisa asks, What were astronomers in the fourth century debating, and what was Hypatia’s answer?

Edward Watts
This is a really interesting question, because the popular understanding of Hypatia shaped by the movie Agora is that Hypatia is an astronomer who a sort of precursor to the understanding of a heliocentric universe is. And this isn’t really what she’s talking about, you know, when they’re when they’re talking about astronomy. They’re conducting observations. They’re interested in principles, but they don’t have a Copernican sense of what the universe is. But I think that the important thing with astronomy in antiquity is to understand that in many contexts, astronomy is also intensely connected to astrology. And so, when you see people taking observations of the stars, this is something that’s also connected with a sort of divine practice and then understanding that the stars have a very direct influence on what’s happening in the world. Now, we don’t know for sure that Hypatia, subscribe to that in the way that other Neoplatonist did, we just don’t have the material to say that. But we do know that she’s very interested in constructing and utilizing instruments to observe the stars. We know that her students and easiest actually asks for how you can get something like this. And we also know that later philosophers later Platanus deeply appreciated the connection between astronomical observation and astrological projection. So I think that we have to see in the study of astronomy, not what the movie agarose says, which is a kind of proto rationalist way of understanding the heavens, we have to understand it on the terms that someone in antiquity would, which is that astronomy and astrology are linked, intimately linked and they’re intimately linked as well to the understanding of the Divine and how the divine fits together with this temporal world.

Josh Landy
Okay, so let’s think a little bit about this. I’m gonna unpack this notion of the Divine as understood by Neo-Platonists like Hypatia, because there she is a prominent figure, public philosopher, leader of a school famous Neoplatonist, so what is this Neo-Platonism where you got Plotinus, you got Porphyry, you’ve got Iamblichus, these big figures of the movement alongside Hypatia, the notion of the one some kind of transcendent first principle that somehow gives rise to intellect and intellect gives rise to soul. And soul generates the material world and, and we’re part of that, but we can somehow rise above the physical, rise above the bodily tip to contemplate the one, and Porphyry adds the idea that the one is God, and Iamblichus who says that there are rituals you can do to help you get back into touch with the one. Say a little bit more about this and clarify all this for us. Some of this seems clear to me, and, and some of that I want to understand better.

Edward Watts
So I think you laid out the system quite well. I think the one thing that in the fourth century context we have to understand is there are two approaches. The applicant approach and the sort of Neo-Platonism and Porphyry and approach to bringing your soul back up the hierarchy so that you can communicate and unify with the divine. And those traditions are at odds with each other. So, what Plotinus and Porphyry believed is, you know, you as an individual have a bodily component and a sort of psychic or soul component. And if you are able to fully interact just with reality on that level of the Soul, it’s possible that you can then rise up the chain of being from material world to the world that is inhabited by the Divine and ultimately, potentially unify yourself with the one it’s very hard to do. We know that Porphyry struggled with this. And you know, in the life of Plotinus, he talks about only achieving this very few times and going into depression because it was so hard for him to do this. The Iamblichan structure is a little bit different. But there are ways to kind of shortcut the approach so that you can do it better and do it more regularly, through particular rituals. And this these are rituals that are called ‘theurgy’. The Iamblichan tradition wins out ultimately over the Porphyrian tradition. But in the fourth century, it was not at all clear that would happen. So, the Iamblichan tradition is the tradition that for example, the Emperor Julian adhered to. But in philosophical circles, there is a real conflict in the time of Hypatia, between these two approaches. One of them really dominated the rich, and of course, this is a problem for Christians. But for pagans, it actually seems like it works better, you know, the religious and spirit it’s more intense. The ability to achieve union is more regular, and therefore it’s more attractive. But if you are in a diverse city, like Alexandria, and you’re trying to teach a Christian population like Alexandria and Christians are studying under Hypatia, this Iamblichan approach does not work. It’s absolutely impossible for this to work with Christians, but the Porphyrian approach can work. And so, there is a market of Christians who want philosophical training from somebody who’s going to be respectful of their traditions, but also someone who has the chops to really do this well. And that is what Hypatia is understanding.

Josh Landy
Okay, this brings us back to something we were talking about at the beginning. And we also heard about in the Reverend philosophical report, which is, tragically, she ended up murdered at the hands of a Christian mob. So, for a while, somehow it was working in terms of her appealing to a broad audience, and then sort of suddenly it wasn’t. Can you say a little bit more about what happened?

Edward Watts
So the bishop in Alexandria as you know, for most of Hypatia’s teaching career was a man named Theophilus had a good working relationship with Hypatia, they didn’t exactly trust each other, but they interacted well enough that Theophilus, for example, will officiate at the wedding of Synesius, Hypatia’s student. But the Theophilus had anointed his nephew Cyril as the bishop in waiting. And when the office died, it was at the end of a long illness where the position of Bishop was sort of absent. There wasn’t anybody actually running the show, the office was there in name, but he wasn’t able to actually do the job. And this led to a contested election, where there was violence in the streets between Cyril and opponents. Once Cyril became bishop, he started exacting revenge against people in the city. And this caused enough trouble that the governor of the city started trying to figure out how to put together an anti-civilian party, Hypatia was chosen to lead this because of her connections because of her strong credibility as a philosopher. And because of her work in serving Alexandria, and Alexandria in political life in a philosophical way. She seemed a natural person, because also, of course, she’s not Christian. So, she has no interest in who the Bishop of Alexandria is. The problem is, she did the job too well. And so she creates a philosophically inspired group of people who are a credible threat to Cyril’s ability to do what he wants in the city of Alexandria. It gives the governor enough cover that he can begin to oppose Cyril and work against Cyril. And Cyril then singles out Hypatia as the core of the power base that the governor is using against Cyril. And so, she becomes a target, in large part because she’s so good at what she’s doing. That you know, she has to in the view of some Christians be kind of removed from the political scene so that Cyril can do what he wants.

Josh Landy
So many echoes today, unscrupulous leaders finding expedient to whip up frenzy among zealots to get scapegoats and innocent people getting killed. But you’re listening to Philosophy Talk today we’re thinking about Hypatia of Alexandria with Edward Watts, author of Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher.

Ray Briggs
What is Hypatia’s philosophical legacy today? Can we create a world where more women philosophers get the prominence they deserve? How can we preserve their insights for future generations?

Josh Landy
A female future for philosophy—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sexity-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Fiona Apple
Nothing’s gonna change my world, nothing’s gonna change my world.

Josh Landy
Across the universe, Hypatia of Alexandria definitely changed our world. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Edward Watts from UC San Diego, nd we’re thinking about the life and thought of Hypatia As part of our new series “Wise Women,” generously funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in the series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women.

Josh Landy
Ed, we’ve got a question from a listener. Lana from San Francisco writes, I know there’s a journal of feminist philosophy called Hypatia. It seems like she’s become a feminist icon in the last century. How warranted is that reputation?

Edward Watts
It’s absolutely warranted. But I think the reason we know if Hypatia now is not the reason why we should think about Hypatia, as a figure who is warranting attention for 2000 years, Hypatia is remembered now because she was killed. She had no control over that. It was not anything where she exercised any agency whatsoever. Something was done to her and we remember her because she was a martyr at a moment of great social change. That’s not why we should remember her. What we should remember is that this is a woman who changed philosophy and changed her city on her own terms, understanding full well what the consequences of that would be for her as an individual.

Ray Briggs
So Ed, can you tell us a bit about Hypatia’s legacy now.

Edward Watts
So Hypatia has been a figure interpreted and reinterpreted many times over the past 1600 years. So, in the fifth century, initially, Hypatia became a symbol of a society spinning out of control. I think the best example of this is the historian Socrates Scholastichus (who has a little coda at the end of his history) where he talks about the Bishop’s overreaching into political affairs and the negative consequences of this and he stacks the consequences from least severe to most severe. The second most severe consequence of bishops overstepping their bounds is the sack of Rome. The most severe is the murder of Hypatia. And so, in the fifth century, what you have is a sense that this is something that just should not happen. And Hypatia becomes a symbol of an individual occupying a role that is understood to be respected, and tolerated and valued, and she’s murdered because of it. By the time you get into the sixth and seventh century, you start having somewhat different traditions, particularly in like the Egyptian church, where Cyril is a saint. And therefore, Hypatia is a villain. And so, you have in the seventh century, a set of materials from Egypt that talk about her effectively like she’s a witch, and that she’s using rituals and magic to seduce arrestees, the Roman governor so that he opposes Cyril. By the time you get into the medieval period, Hypatia is known as a kind of exemplar for what women can do as intellectuals. And so, they’re examples of like Byzantine emperors who are compared to Hypatia, because they like her are intellectuals who are functioning in a social way. Another shift happens as you move into the enlightenment. And here there is a real tension because people are now pushing back against the idea of Cyril as a saint. And there’s a real tension of what Hypatia then means. One tradition that I think is particularly appealing, is embodied by a set of works that are published in the early 18th century. Were a French woman we don’t know her name, she’s just mademoiselle ‘b’, who commissioned someone to write a biography of Hypatia, and she doesn’t get the biography that she expects the person writes a defensive Cyril, in essence. But really, Hypatia is a symbol of what women can achieve if they’re allowed to do it. We don’t know who she is. But we know that there is already in the 18th century a sentiment that Hypatia is an exemplar of what society could be if it allowed women to occupy a prominent place in interpreting philosophy and in teaching and in the world around them. And so Hypatia by the time we get to the 20th century, that legacy of Hypatia is one that has emerged.

Ray Briggs
It seems like the Hypatia as a symbol of women achieving things is actually pretty recent. She starts out as a symbol of just people being murdered by this desperate or people who ought to be murdered by this desperate because he was right. I’m always kind of ambivalent about this idea of being held up as the exemplar of one of your kind, who can do philosophy as opposed to just a person doing philosophy? Do you have thoughts about how to navigate that?

Edward Watts
I think the easiest way to navigate that is to understand that Hypatia is the best attested of these female philosophers in antiquity, but she’s not the only one. There are other female philosophers who we know about. Were there other female philosophers who we know ran schools. None of them were as successful as Hypatia. But we know they existed. The other thing that’s important that makes Hypatia kind of singular figure in ancient philosophy is she’s the last one to run her own school. Because of her murder what we see are women philosophers continued to teach, but they do it now under this sort of heading of a male lead school. And so, we have women philosophers in the later fifth and I think in the sixth century, who are doing some teaching and certainly belonging to philosophical communities, but they are not leading their own school like Hypatia.

Josh Landy
That makes sense to me. You even got later female Neoplatonists, but as you say, they’re not as powerful and as prominent. They’re not such public figures as Hypatia. But that’s interesting is one of the things that makes it interesting is that she doesn’t herself that just Hypatia itself doesn’t seem to have feminist things to say right? She has lots of things to say about mathematics, and about astronomy, and about philosophy. But it seems like as a Neo-Platonist , her philosophy can have that much to do specifically with feminism, because seems like that would ultimately be about something in the material world, and we’re supposed to transcend the material world. So how does her thinking intersect if at all with feminism?

Edward Watts
So there’s, I think, a really interesting point that we can build on with that comment. I think, and this is somewhat controversial, in Hypatia’s view, the soul is not gendered. And if you’re living in a community that’s governed by the soul, gender doesn’t matter. So, there’s actually an account that we have, that’s a great summary of this view. So, one of Hypatia’s inner circle students falls in love with her, and Hypatia initially tries to use Pythagoras Music to calm him. There is a sense in Pythagorean traditions that music is a way to sort of organize and reorganize the soul and return to it, kind of check back in to where it ought to be. And so Hypatia tries this and doesn’t work. She then in it seems in a public space, takes out her menstrual pad, shows it to him and maybe even throws it at him and says, “This is what you love.” And it shocks him because it makes him recognize that what he’s in love with is a physical body, when really what he has is a connection to her soul already. And that connection to her soul is what matters. So, I think on some level, what we see with Hypatia is a figure who appreciates the non-gendered way that a soul can work, but also understands that for most people, she will be seen as possessing a female body. And there’s a challenge that comes about from interacting with people in a world who are not appreciating what she actually is and what she’s actually doing. And it causes problems for her. But she’s willing to accept those problems, because her philosophical mission is so important.

Ray Briggs
You mentioned that some of your readings of Hypatia were controversial. And I understand this because not all of her writings have survived. What have we got of her that we are getting evidence about her ideas from?

Edward Watts
Yeah, like nothing. We have a mathematical text that is probably her dissertation. And so this relates to a very early phase in Hypatia’s career when she’s still working under her father. We have texts like the anecdote that I just shared, that I think if Hypatia were a pre-Socratic philosopher, we would say, Okay, well, that’s a text, we’re totally fine with that. But because she’s a late antique philosopher, we just oh, that’s, you know, that’s just something that appears in a biography. We don’t take it seriously. So, I think that there are a few texts like that, from Hypatia that we can use to understand practically how our philosophy works. We also have letters from her student Synesius of Sirenia, that shows him interacting with her in a fashion that allows us to see what her basic ideas and practices would have been.

Ray Briggs
So she sounds a little bit like Socrates in this way, where there are no extant writings of Socrates, probably because there were no writings of Socrates. But we have all of these other reflected pieces of information about her and about him.

Edward Watts
Yeah, I think that that’s probably a good a good way to frame it. Um, the other thing that I would just add is, we have a tendency to think that what ancient philosophers, right is what they specialize in. And it is how their entire philosophy worked. And I think that’s not true. You know, they participate in a system where philosophy guides their entire life, what they choose to write about is what they choose to write about. And so, the fact that we only have a mathematical text for my patient doesn’t mean she’s just a mathematician. It means that’s what she chose to write.

Josh Landy
But this absence of a great deal of text, sort of allows the later centuries to inscribe their version of her onto the walls of history, right? So, she’s sort of like a cipher and she can be a symbol of clerical overreach. She could be, you know, in the enlightenment, a philosophical martyr, and then the 19th century and martyr for science and these days a feminist icon. Do you think this enlightenment sense that it’s really all about the misbehavior of religious authorities is still alive today? I think about the fact that you know, Cyril got canonized. He’s St. Cyril. Is that still a part of her legacy today?

Edward Watts
I think that it is part of her legacy. And I think the other thing that’s important for us to understand is the tradition that Hypatia embody dies with Hypatia. This idea of Christian friendly Porphyrian tradition and approach to philosophy in Alexandria does not continue after her heat and becomes in later centuries the Iamblichan tradition. And so the murder of Hypatia kills a tradition that might have survived and been more successful and more robust and, you know, in the future. So I think that you’re right, that what we have here is something where the legacy of Hypatia is very much determined by the fact she was killed, both in the historical memory and then also of course, in the legacy of her philosophical system.

Ray Briggs
So if we wanted this to not happen in the future, if we wanted the legacies of women in philosophy and philosophy in general not to be destroyed, what would you recommend?

Josh Landy
And not just not to be destroyed, but also to have the positive part of Hypatia is life the part where she’s taking control of her destiny and exerting this huge influence.

Ray Briggs
Right, to thrive?

Edward Watts
Yeah, I think what’s important is to acknowledge that the philosophers that we are talking about are people and they are people who face significant challenges in getting their ideas out constructing schools getting the positioning so that their ideas can be meaningful. And we have to recognize their achievements as people because philosophy is a way of life, and philosophy and antiquity, involves your ideas, but it also involves your practices, we have to acknowledge the significance of the practices and the sacrifices that she made. And when we do this and acknowledge the wholeness of someone’s person, we have a much greater likelihood of preserving their legacy.

Josh Landy
And this has been a really inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Edward Watts
Oh, I loved it. Thank you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Edward Watts, Professor of History at UC San Diego and author of Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. So, Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
And thinking I wish I could have gotten to know Hypatia when she was alive and hear her for myself, and also that I really enjoyed Ed’s book, which I found just deeply engaging and readable and would encourage our readers to go check that out.

Josh Landy
Oh, 100%. You know, yes, she’s not alive. But you know, there are people like 19th century French poet LeConte de Lisle who think she hasn’t really left us. She says, “She alone survives immutable, eternal, the world still turned beneath her to pale feet.” We’re gonna put links to that and to Ed’s book and to everything we mentioned today, on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and dive deep into our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, a man who could speed his way through the entire library of Alexandria—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, last known member of the library of Alexandra, sacked and burned by the time she came along. She was supersmart and taught to become, unusually for a woman at that time, a philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. She also made commentary on ancient texts, and even made commentary on commentary, a respected activity back then. It is now thought that Book III of Theon’s version of Ptolemy’s Almagest—which established the Earth-centric model for the universe later destroyed by Galileo—was actually written by Hypatia. She never married, made her own astrolabes, and taught that skill to others, activities she preferred to birthing whelps for the glory of empire. Just speculating. As you can imagine from the trashing the Great Library, 4th Century Egypt was not really the time or place to be a thinking person. Jews and pagans and Christians were colliding all the time, and Christians colliding with each other, as they fought among themselves to establish an orthodox canon. Still, Romans at that time were free to worship a pantheon of gods; often deities from separate cultures merged into a new one. Serapis was one such, a mash up of Zeus and Osiris. His temple housed the remains of the Library of Alexandria, with statues of other gods, and lecture halls for pagan teachers like Hypatia. She was a Neo-Platonist, they say, meaning she was kind of a syncretistic on her own. Hypatia encouraged personal meditation on the nature of reality, and her philosophy was not tethered to any particular deity. Since Alexandrian schools were not divided by religion; she taught both Christians and pagans, making allies of both. Though sympathetic to the new religion, with several close friends in the church, Hypatia viewed herself as a philosopher and was considered pagan. She gave talks attended by government officials wanting her advice. Her sex may have irked her Christian adversaries, fixated on restricting women’s influence, but she was aristocratic and influential, and her public lectures drew crowds. She advised Orestes, Alexandria’s Roman prefect, who was feuding with Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Orestes was Christian, but did not want to cede power to the church. Following a massacre of Christians by Jewish extremists, Cyril led a crowd that expelled all Jews from the city and looted their homes and temples. Orestes protested to the Roman government in Constantinople and refused Cyril’s attempts at reconciliation. A rumor spread accusing Hypatia of stopping Orestes from making up with Cyril. Inevitably a dread gang of monks, called the parabolani, supposedly formed to nurse the dying and the sick, but now a kind of fifth century version of the Proud Boys, or Brown Shirts, beating and killing at the whispered behest of this bishop or that, took to the street, dragged Hypatia from her carriage, ripped the clothes from her body, beat her to death with roofing tiles, and tore her to pieces. Yaow. It seems that the greatest achievement of Hypatia was not introducing new ideas but carrying the flame of philosophical inquiry into this dark burning world. It’s a tiny victory, I suppose, but it is known that her student, Synesius, became a bishop and incorporated Neoplatonic principles into the doctrine of the Trinity. But also, heretics and texts and temples burned, churches grew, and the path of faith grew narrower and more treacherous. Hypatia was pretty much forgotten for more than a thousand years. Then went on to become a ghost of what she actually was, which nobody even knows. Then she became a lot of things, for one, a kind of pagan martyr. After all, the mob that killed her believed or was told she was a witch. She became a kind of Christian martyr as well, because history does love a virgin martyr. She became a feminist role model, with a scholarly quarterly named for her. We don’t even know how old she was when she died. 35? 65? But representations of her tend to be old school -Roman marble, glimpsed from the side, draped in robes, handsome but not sexy lord no. She was a teacher, children. Save that stuff for the schoolyard. Do we still have schoolyards? Do we still have schools? I guess we do. I don’t know if we learn anything now though.

Agora
“I’d like you to know that your exposition shows me that you’ve been paying closer attention than one or two others here.”

Ian Shoales
Education, man—that is so woke. I gotta go

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
The views expressed—

Ray Briggs
or mis-expressed!

Josh Landy
…on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org, where you too can become a subscriber to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.