Visions of the History of Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity and in the Greek and Arabic Middle Ages

Constructing knowledge on the formative period of Greek philosophy is not an easy task. Texts authored by the philosophers started falling apart in pieces from the outset and are only preserved in a fragmentary way. Anyone interested in Greek philosophy depends on reconstructions made by predecessors. While different traditions and sources produced in the past have been queried by modern scholars for information on the early Greek philosophy itself, they have been little studied for what they really were: visions of the Greek philosophy's past. Meanwhile, these visions reflected how specific intellectual groups and particular authors viewed philosophy as such, what they needed it for and how they understood their own place in its development. Of these, we focus on some of the earliest and most diverse phases of this process: the early Roman Empire, Late Antiquity ("pagan" and Christian), the Arabic and Byzantine Middle Ages.