Hypatie d'Alexandrie

The article offers a general vision of the ancient and modern reception of the pagan philosopher Hypatia whose martyrdom in 415 symbolizes the religious obscurantism of the early Christians. It analyzes the mechanisms in the ancient transmission of knowledge, which have underwritten a long tradition in the European history of ideas. Specifically, it questions the tradition that emerged from texts that spoke about Hypatia: for example, the letters Synesius of Cyrene supposedly sent to the woman he designates as his Mistress. Far from revealing the historic reality of a very platonic love between a scholar and a woman whose intelligence was seen as quasi-divine, these letters reveal instead a fictive philosophical couple, where the chosen one emerges as the only disciple capable of understanding the essence of philosophical speech (like Diotima and Socrates). Following this deconstruction of the figure of the Neoplatonist philosopher, the article explores the construction of an historical Hypatia, notably the debates around the paternity and co-paternity of Hyaptia’s works dealing with astronomy and mathematics. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of orality in the ancient philosophical tradition from the Pythagoricians to the Alexandrian circles at the end of the 3rd century and the beginning of the 4th century A.D.