Lecture by David Runia: "On the Indestructibility of the Cosmos: Philo of Alexandria’s Most Controversial Work."

The YDS and Yale communities are invited to a Classics and Divinity School Lecture on Thursday, November 6, by David Runia, a Dutch-Australian scholar of ancient and patristic philosophy.

Professor Runia's lecture will address "On the Indestructibility of the Cosmos: Philo of Alexandria’s Most Controversial Work." The event takes place at 5:30 p.m. in Niebuhr Hall at the Divinity School, with a reception to follow in the Croll Family Entrance Hall.

From 1991 to 1999, Runia was C J De Vogel Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Utrecht, and from 1992 to 2002 he held the chair of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at Leiden University. From 2002 to 2016, he was Master of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne, where he has also been a Professorial Fellow since 2002.

His research interests are Philo of Alexandria and Hellenistic Judaism, the Platonist tradition in ancient philosophy, and the study of the sources of our knowledge of ancient philosophy with a particular emphasis on the role of ancient doxography. In 2020, he and Jaap Mansfeld published the first critical edition of the Placita of the doxographer Aëtius since the edition of H. Diels in 1879. He has been the co-editor of The Studia Philonica Annual (SBL Press) since 1989 and is the chief editor of the monograph series Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Brill).

David was elected a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999, and he is a correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.

The lecture is cosponsored by Yale Divinity School and Yale’s Department of Classics.