I would love to have a dinner with Philo of Alexandria even though we would be more likely to disagree on most issues. I am, after all, of the world of Heisenberg and Gödel, not of Heron and Hipparchus. But still we would have much to discuss, especially the interpretation of Plato’s dialogues and of the Bible — though it’s unclear how much of the latter Philo knew in Hebrew.

Of great interest to me is a problem, still unsettled despite Plotinus and Heidegger: If reasoning of various kinds seems to lead us inevitably to identify some highest principle of unity — which, depending on how exactly we get there, we can call Truth, Nature, God, the One or just Being — how can we then say anything meaningful about the relation of this unity to the evident multiplicity in which we live?

Philo seems to have been among the first to take seriously the thought that we cannot do this, and that, in particular, we need to recognize limits on what we could possibly know or say about that ultimate unity. Negative or apophatic theology might well be his innovation, and I would like to know more about how he came to this line of thought.

Of course, we would also have more practical topics to discuss: Roman politics and personalities; how Jews can live in a seemingly cosmopolitan environment that still generates recurrent violent hatred toward them; and how to live a life that gives both communal responsibilities and detached contemplation their due.

Professor Joshua Weinstein is a Senior Fellow at the Herzl Institute, Jerusalem, and author of ‘Plato’s Threefold City and Soul‘, published by Cambridge.