"Els terapeutes" com a filòsofs en el "De vita contemplativa" de Filó d'Alexandria

In the well-known text of Philo of Alexandria’s De Vita Contemplativa, scholars today may find the portrayal of a community of men and women living in the first century AD who were united by their particular understanding of the contemplative life and by the lifestyle they adopted. This community lived in relative seclusion on the flanks of a hill overlooking Lake Mareotis, near Alexandria, and as ascetics who dedicated their lives to contemplation in silence and solitude, they named themselves therapeutae. But in Philo’s text they are further described not only as «philosophers», but as «true philosophers». The purpose of the present paper, therefore, is to understand something of the scope and meaning of the Mareot therapeutae’s philosophical life – conditioned, as this must be, by the fact that all we know comes from Philo’s work, and because while he refers to them there as «true philosophers», his study only examines the community in their historical context.