Eudorus

This morning, I read some of my friend’s notes on Eudorus of Alexandria, who lived in the first century B.C.E.

Eudorus believed that the intellect was the part of the soul that was most akin to the divine, and so he maintained that happiness could come from the intellect alone. As a result, he departed from early Platonists such as Antiochus, who thought that physical pleasures could contribute to happiness. At the same time, Eudorus held that physical pleasures could have a preliminary role on the road to happiness.

Whereas Pythagoreans believed that there was only one pair of primordial principles that led to the formation of the cosmos—the monad and the dyad (see Roots TNG 4-5, Reward and Punishment in Wisdom Literature?, YHWH Alone, We’re Rodents!, Pythagoreans on the Cosmos’ Origin), Eudorus proposed that there was a supreme principle above the monad and the dyad, and that this supreme principle produced matter. The Jewish philosopher Philo liked this view of Eudorus, for it was consistent with his own Jewish monotheism.