Fragment and Totality
The Philosophical Form of Gregory Palamas’ One Hundred and Fifty Chapters
Abstract
This article offers a philosophical analysis of Gregory Palamas’ One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, focusing on the philosophical form through which the text articulates unity and totality. Rather than treating the fragmentary structure of the Capita as a secondary vehicle for doctrinal content, the study argues that fragmentation performs a constitutive philosophical function.
Situated within the context of ancient and late antique philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism and the Pseudo‑Dionysian corpus, the analysis explores how fragmentary articulation safeguards unity from reduction to a conceptual system. In these traditions, such a mode of ontological articulation affirms totality without totalisation. Against this background, Palamas’ work is interpreted as enacting a model of unity that resists discursive synthesis.
The article demonstrates that the coherence of the Capita arises not from linear argumentation or deductive order, but from relations of resonance, repetition, and mutual illumination among autonomous fragments. Totality remains operative as a real horizon of intelligibility without being constructed or closed. Ultimately, the philosophical form of the Chapters is presented as an instance of “totality without system,” offering a significant alternative to modern totalising models of metaphysical thought.
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