Philo of Alexandria

Philo was a Jewish thinker in Alexandria in the first half of the first century BCE. He was mostly an exegete of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Jewish Bible), who relied on allegorical rather than literal interpretation, maybe in an attempt to merge Greek philosophy and Jewish scripture. For example, Philo would interpret characters of the Hebrew Bible as aspects of the human being, and biblical stories as emblematic of universal human experience, an interesting movement towards abstraction. Philo’s conception of God is also abstract, since for him, God is transcendent in such a way that only his existence, and nothing else, can be known. Through Philo we meet the Greek term λόγος (logos). This term, which broadly speaking refers to reason, or a principle or power that gives order to the world, was first used by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (5th century BCE), and has since been used in different ways, all the way into the twentieth century, for example in Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger or Jacques Lacan. Philo’s use of the term is related to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and for him Logos was an intermediary divine being that God used to create the world.

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