Alessandro Stavru

Questo libro prende in esame il carattere “variopinto” (poikilos) che Platone rinviene nell’anima e nelle emozioni che la pervadono. La nozione di poikilia sottende una moltitudine eterogenea di elementi che, proprio in virtù della sua irriducibile complessità e dinamicità, è in grado di apparire sempre come in sé coerente e unitaria.
Il volume si cimenta con questa complessità, nel tentativo non di risolvere, ma di evidenziare – e se possibile anche di problematizzare – le difficoltà insite nella teoria platonica delle emozioni. La finalità è di analizzare le emozioni platoniche nella loro articolazione e stratificazione. Se la linea di ricerca più diffusa è oggi volta ad analizzare specifiche emozioni in precisi contesti dialogici, questo volume si propone di far luce sulle molteplici forme che l’esperienza emotiva assume nell’insieme del corpus Platonicum. Trovano spazio contributi dei maggiori esperti sull’argomento, i quali vengono arricchiti da prospettive innovative, avanzate da studiosi giovani e promettenti.

Con contributi di Mariapaola Bergomi, Douglas Cairns, Laura
Candiotto, Melania Cassan, Fulvia de Luise, Gabriele Flamigni, José
Antonio Giménez, Luca Grecchi, David Konstan, Laura Marongiu,
Maurizio Migliori, Linda M. Napolitano, Anna Pavani, Olivier
Renaut e Alessandro Stavru.

It is a well-known fact that the concept of kairos encompasses a wide variety of meanings, ranging from “due time”, “critical situation”, “appropriate or decisive moment”, to “correct behaviour” and “skilful action”. All of these meanings point not only to the temporal, spatial and circumstantial characteristics of kairos, but also, and more importantly, to the action that is required in order to seize a favourable opportunity in a given moment. Without such action, and the ability to perform it, the kairos does not yield any advantage, thus remaining unexploited. On the other hand, without kairos no action can be successful, as even the most refined ability is by itself no guarantee for a successful outcome. In the Graeco-Roman world, kairos is therefore always linked with specific skills: in arts such as poetry, rhetoric, medicine, divination, alchemy and in a variety of techniques such as those needed in farming, warfare and sports, the successful outcome depends on the ability to grasp the kairos that is within reach at a given moment.

This volume examines the different meanings of kairos as reflected in the methodologies commonly applied in the arts and techniques, showing how these help to broaden and deepen our knowledge of kairos. The chapters investigate both aspects of kairos: that relating to its objective conditions, i.e. its manifestation on certain occasions and circumstances; and that relating to its subjective conditions, i.e. the skills needed to grasp the opportune moment in which it should be utilized.

What does it mean to be in conversation with Socrates? This book tackles this question from multiple angles. The Socratic dialogue is analysed in relation to education (paideia), soul (psyche) and happiness (eudaimonia). Particular attention is devoted to elenchus, through which Socrates is able to unveil the presumption of knowledge of his interlocutors, leading them to examine their self and become aware of their lack of knowledge. Xenophon, Aeschines and Plato provide evidence of a dialogical practice which has a protreptic aim: through refutation, the interlocutors of Socrates achieve a self-improvement that is both emotional and cognitive. The transformative features of Socratic self-care are discussed in a series of passages that are reported in the book and examined specifically.

Aristotele dedica al piacere una ricerca costante che spazia dalle prime opere “essoteriche” alle ultime. Attraverso un costante affinamento problematico, e approfondendo la tematica con estremo rigore, finì con l’inventariarne scientificamente ogni manifestazione. Nulla sfugge a questa straordinaria enciclopedia: il piacere della vita sociale e quello della politica, il piacere del possesso dei beni materiali, il piacere come orizzonte etico e come aspirazione al divino, il piacere fisico e corporale, e quello più alto determinato dalla vita spirituale, e naturalmente il piacere erotico (e sessuale: maschile e femminile, etero- ed omosessuale) e il piacere estetico. Insomma, la più completa antropologia del piacere elaborata dal mondo occidentale, che ha esercitato un potente influsso nel grandioso tentativo aristotelico di dare un senso alle cose, all’uomo, a Dio. Modello insuperato, col quale tutte le epoche successive hanno dovuto confrontarsi.

This volume in honour of Linda Napolitano is a collection of twenty-two essays dealing with emotions in Plato. Particular attention is paid to the multiple ways in which Plato tackles the government of the passions. The chapters deal with single passions or several of them, with a focus on specific dialogues or entire sections of the Platonic corpus. The chapters question the idea of a merely cognitive (or rigoristic) approach to Plato’s emotions, and revolve around Plato’s semantics of affectivity, its meaning for the body/soul complex (the psyche, its internal partitions and its relationship with the soma), as well as the wide range of Platonic emotions, i.e., not only the 'positive' emotions (happiness, love, courage, etc.), but also the destructive and ‘negative’ ones (anger, envy, hatred etc.)—the investigation of which still plays a limited role in Platonic studies.

In both ancient tradition and modern research Pythagoreanism has been understood as religious sect or as a philosophical and scientific community. Numerous attempts have been made to reconcile these pictures as well as to analyze them separately. The most recent scholarship compartmentalizes different facets of Pythagorean knowledge, but this offers no context for exploring their origins, development, and interdependence. This collection aims to reverse this trend, addressing connections between the different fields of Pythagorean knowledge, such as eschatology, metempsychosis, epistemology, arithmology, numerology, music, dietetics, medicine and politics. In particular, the contributions discuss how the Pythagorean way of life related to more doctrinal aspects of knowledge, such as Pythagorean religion and science. The volume explores the effects of this interdependence between different kinds of knowledge both within the Pythagorean corpus and in its later reception. Chapters cover historical periods from the Archaic Period (6th century BC) to Neoplatonism, Early Christianity, the European and Arabic Middle Ages, and the Renaissance through to the Early Modern Period (17th century AD).

This collection offers the revised versions of the papers presented at ‚Socratica III – a conference on Socrates, the Socratics, and the ancient Socratic literature‘ (Trento, Italy, 2012).

The volume approaches the Socratic question from a viewpoint that radically departs from mainstream lines of interpretation. It focuses on the issues the Socratics were able to develop in the fierce struggle among themselves, i. e. on the dynamic context in which these issues were posed, discussed, and eventually fixed in dogmatic theories within the philosophical and non-philosophical Greek literature of the 5th  and 4th centuries B.C.

The following topics are examined: 1. the ‘intellectual movement’ around Socrates; 2. the literary context in which the texts of the Socratics are framed; 3. major topics discussed within this movement, their development within and outside the Socratic circle, and their reception in Late Antiquity; 4. the state of the art of the ‘Socratic question.’

This book deals with appearance (phainesthai) in antiquity, a topic that has so far received only scant attention by scholars in ancient aesthetics. It focuses on a group of philosophers who were active in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, namely the Pythagoreans of the Classical age (from Philolaus to Aristotle), Gorgias, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato. In teachings directly or indirectly attributed to these thinkers, a dialectic between the visible and the invisible does emerge. This dialectic entails issues that are of major importance for understanding ancient phainesthai, such as the production of appearance (as in Gorgias and Xenophon), the coincidence between virtue and beauty (as in Socrates' paradoxical kalokagathia), and the relationship between interiority and exteriority (as in the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers and in Plato's theory of knowledge).

Since its inception in 1975, the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi
Filosofici has devoted a special attention to scholarly research in
Ancient Philosophy. This short book is meant to offer an overview of
the events and the publications in which this particular interest
reverberated through more than three decades.
The present overview is prefaced by two essays: the first was authored in the Nineties by the late Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, the distinguished ancient historian who was fellow of the Accademia dei Lincei and Director of the Istituto until
his death in February 2010; the second, dating back to the same
period, is written by the late Marcello Gigante, the Greek philologist
renowned for enhancing research on the Herculaneum
Papyri.

This book deals with the Greek cure of the soul, focusing in particular on Socrates, who turned this idea into the core of his own philosophy. The first chapter offers an overlook of the different meanings of psyche from myth to Homer, Orphism, and the Presocratics (until Diogenes of Apollonia). The following chapters deal with Socrates’ peculiar understanding of the cure of the soul. Chapter two introduces to the “Socratic question” from the viewpoint of the Socratic cure of the soul. Chapter three focuses on the dialogues attributed to Plato (Apology, Phaedrus, and the First Alcibiades). Chapter four on Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The study shows that one common thread among these different accounts is the relationship between the soul and the divine: the Socratic cure of the soul implies an openness to both the world and its cosmic order.

This book deals with the as yet mostly unpublished writings on Socrates of the German philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958) stored at the German Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar. It provides a comprehensive interpretation of all the manuscripts, notes, drafts for conferences, and university lectures Otto wrote on Socrates from the early 1940s to 1958. These writings touch upon the following topics: Otto’s ancient and modern sources on Socrates, his account of the “novelty” Socrates, Socrates’ character, physiognomy, life and death; the religion of Socrates; Socrates’s ethics of knowledge; the interiority of Socrates’s knowledge; the ancient and modern ethics of will from Aristotle to Kierkegaard.
The book enquires into Otto’s interpretation of Socrates’ most renowned doctrines (on the good, the ti esti, the happiness, the forms, the soul, the virtue and its equivalence with utility). Otto claims that all of these doctrines are linked to each other, and constitute the cornerstones of a knowledge-based ethics. This ethics is dominated by Socrates’s faith in the goodness of being, i.e. in the equivalence of the moral-epistemic agathon and the practical-utilitaristic ophelimon/chresimon. Otto interprets Socrates's "optimistic" faith in morality as a religious approach to knowledge that is a core feature of the Greek world, having its origin in the Homeric knowledge (eidenai) of the Olympian divinities (here Otto’s account links up with his major work, “The Homeric Gods” of 1929). Another important feature of Socrates’s knowledge ethics, to which the last chapter of the book is devoted, lies in its contraposition to the ethics of the will. Otto sketches the development of the ethics of will from Antiquity (Aristotle and Roman age) to the early Middle Ages (Early Christianity) until modernity (Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard). An appendix tackles Otto’s diagnose of a failure of the ethics of will after the atrocities of World War II and the necessity to return to a “Socratic” ethics of knowledge.

This is the Italian edition of Walter F. Otto’s most renowned work, “Die Götter Griechenlands” (1929). This book has been translated into English in 1954 (with the title “The Homeric Gods”), and since then reprinted a number of times (last edition 2014). The English title is somewhat deceptive, since Otto’s book does not confine itself to Homer, but provides an overall interpretation of Greek religion. The postface to this edition deals with the genesis and the fortune of Otto’s book: it explains how the Latinist Walter F. Otto came to write a book on Greek religion, and why this book spawned a variety of reactions, some positive (Heidegger and Gadamer, but also Armstrong, Detienne, Untersteiner, and Cilento), some adverse if not completely hostile (Nilsson, Pfister, Weinreich, van der Leeuw, Rose, Gernet, Omodeo, and Mondolfo).

Cicero is one of the most important witnesses of Socratic literature. His writings contain textual units of otherwise lost Socratic dialogues, some of which are of fundamental importance for reconstructing the conceptions of Socrates' lesser-known companions. For Cicero, Socrates and the Socratics are at the origin, but also at the height, of Greek philosophy. Socrates represents an example of virtue, eloquence, and argumentative method. The only aspect that Cicero criticises of Socrates is the separation between philosophy and oratory, which is evident in several Platonic dialogues. Cicero claims that philosophy and oratory must instead be harmonised: just as the philosopher must have oratorical skills, the orator must have a sound philosophical training.

Several comedies rehearsed from 430 to 410 BCE deal with “education” (paideia). It has been rightly observed that these plays form a “subgenre” of Old Comedy.  At least seven plays by six comedians (Cratinus, Telecleides, Callias, Eupolis, Amipsias, and Plato Comicus) target “wisdom” (sophia) and those who teach or acquire it, the “sophists” or “thinkers” (sophistai or phrontistai).  Such intellectuals, or followers of them, form the choirs of five comedies that center around the matter of teaching and acquiring a new kind of wisdom.  Such wisdom is ridiculed by the comedians as unheard of and weird. It consists of four distinct subjects that were not encompassed in traditional paideia, namely: A) The study of nature; B) Non-official religiosity; C) Fraudulent lyrical and rhetorical skills; D) Asceticism and poverty.
All of these four subjects are core features of Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates. All other playwrights discuss A) without any reference to Socrates and his pupils. Callias is the only comedian who indirectly relates B) to Socrates. C) and D), on the contrary, appear to be unique features of Socrates, not only according to Aristophanes but also according to the other abovementioned comedians.
In my paper, I deal with these four subjects, and show how they are related to the Socrates, and the Socratic features, portrayed by Old Comedy.

This paper is the long version of a short note published in 2015 (“La doxa appare? Nota a DK 28 B1, 28-32 e B8, 51-61”). The paper deals with Parmenides' fragments B1 (28-32) and B8 (51-61). I claim that Parmenides' doxa is intrinsically ambivalent, being on the one hand 'deception', on the other 'appearance'. A number of passages of later authors, who seem to draw on Parmenides, seems to confirm this: Plato, Resp. V 477a-480a; Aristoteles, Metaph. A 986b28-33; Theophrastus Phys. I; Simplicius, In Arist. Phys. IX 38, 20-28 Diels, and In Arist. De cael. VII 557, 21-23 Heiberg. In fact, the terms used by Parmenides bear such ambivalence especially at B1, 28-32, where the semantic affinity between doxa, dokounta, and dokimos is patent.

This paper deals with Nietzsche’s conception of sickness and health, and with how such a conception is reflected in his interpretation of Socrates. According to Nietzsche, Socrates’ personality is characterized by a split between an unconscious, distinctive self and a conscious, rational self. Such personality has pathological features that closely resemble what in psychodynamic theories is commonly defined as a schizoparanoid splitting, i.e. as a position of the ego capable of integrating in the
same personality the affirmative dimension of libido and the negative dimension of aggression. I claim that Socrates’ paradigmatic sickness outlined by Nietzsche depends on the fact that his nature is split and dysfunctional. His unconscious instinct is reversed into a critical spirit, while his rational consciousness enhances his logical and intellectualistic activity.

In Aristophanes’ Birds 1553-1564, Socrates is depicted as a psychagogos, a conjurer of souls. This is the only passage in Socratic literature in which such an activity is attributed to Socrates. In Clouds, which was staged nine years prior to Birds, Socrates’ school is described as the ‘thinkery of wise souls’, and the endeavors of his pupils as a ‘taking care’ of their own souls. The Clouds portrays Socrates as training his pupils in natural philosophy, eristic arguments, and Orphic-Pythagorean rituals: but what Socrates specifically does with the souls of his pupils is not clear at all. For this, we have to look to Birds, and in particular to verses 1553-1564, a passage I examine in detail. I first discuss the passage and how it relates to the comedy as a whole, I then provide a reading of parallel passages from the Clouds and Pythagorean literature, before returning to the verses in the Birds to draw some conclusions. My claim is that the passage has a strong Pythagorean flavor: the psychagogic Socrates depicted by Aristophanes draws on a number of topoi related to issues typical of Pythagoreanism, such as exercise (askesis) and ritual purity (katharsis).

The paper is divided in two parts. In the first section, I delve into the Stoic notion of sugkatatesis, that is, the “assent” by virtue of which the hegemonikon is able to distinguish between true and false sense-perceptions. I show how the process of sugkatatesis works in the famous ekphraseis of the hand and the wax tablet, employed respectively by Zeno and Cleanthes. In the second section of the paper, I deal with Seneca’s ekphrasis of the city of Syracuse, a description that illustrates the illusory features of sense perception.

Akratic behavior is widely discussed not only among Xenophon, but also among other first-generation Socratics as well as Euripides and Aristophanes. This paper provides a close examination of the 5th and 4th century debate over akratic patterns of action, with the aim to highlight that the concepts of akrasia and enkrateia are dynamically related to each other, as every effort to restrain pleasure entails the possibility of falling back into unbridledness. My claim is that for Xenophon as well as for other authors of his time self- control never hints at a pacification of desires, but on the contrary at a continuous struggle against them. In Xenophon, enkrateia and akrasia stand in an inversely proportional relationship to each other: when a man’s pleasures are controlled by enkrateia he is open for knowledge and virtue; when on the contrary the pleasures take control over the body, akrasia rules and enkrateia is thwarted along knowledge and virtuous behavior. This entails that only by looking at how akratic behavior works in Xenophon it is possible to see what enkrateia does in order to restrain such a behavior.

Socrates’ daimonion manifests itself in very peculiar ways. This paper shows that, on the one hand, the daimionion appears as tyche, a chance over which Socrates has no control; on the other hand, it acts as a kairos, as the “right moment” in which a specific action has to be undertaken or avoided. As the kairos, the daimonion yields benefits, both for Socrates and his associates: 1) It directs the choices and actions not only of Socrates, but also, of his friends, companions and fellow citizens; 2) It appears in critical moments of Socrates’ educational activity: thanks to its intervention Socrates is able to perform his elenctic inquiry, and thus make his interlocutors better; 3) It enables Socrates to carefully pick his friends and associates; it thus brings about Socratic synousia, i.e. that kind of “company” that can develop into dialogical activity.

This paper focuses on Socrates's ambivalent view of eros. According to the testimonies of Antisthenes, Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon, Socrates praises the erotic sunousia that leads to virtue and knowledge, and censures the erotic sunousia that aims at achieving physical pleasure (hedone). The first kind of synousia has a protreptic function, since it improves those who are affected by it; the second kind induces lack of control (hubris), and annihilates virtue. This ambivalence of eros is evident in Antisthenes, where eros may be associated with sophia, and is therefore paideutic, or with hedone, and is therefore a ponos to be shunned; in Aeschines (both in the Alcibiades and in the Aspasia), whose view of the "good" eros is radically protreptic and anepistemic; and in Plato and Xenophon, who distinguish between an eros pandemos (that should be avoided) and an eros ouranos (leading to virtue). My claim is that the common ground of these accounts is Socrates's ambivalent erotic sunousia.

In this paper, I deal with a particular feature of Pythagorean katabasis: a sojourn beneath the earth resulting in a change of status into a charismatic figure with special knowledge of the postmortem world that finds its usefulness in the mundane sphere. I claim that this topos is distinctive of early Pythagoreanism, as it can be found in fifth and fourth century Comedy – sources often neglected in the study of Pythagoreanism. The paper is divided in three parts, devoted respectively to Aristophanes’ Clouds, Birds, and Frogs.

Kalokagathia is a central concept in Greek culture. It usually defines the prowess of an individual in a particular field of activity. Thanks to Xenophon, it acquires a markedly moral and aesthetic value. For Xenophon, kalokagathia is neither an innate nor an acquired virtue, but rather the ability to achieve virtue through specific ethical attitudes, such as enkrateia and autarkeia. Most occurrences in Xenophon's Socratic corpus indicate that kalokagathia is a typically Socratic mode of excellence. The term covers eight different domains, all of which entail that  the kaloikagathoi are strictly speaking only the Socratics, i.e. the group
of friends and companions who gather around the kaloskagathos par excellence Socrates (Mem. 1.2.48). Kalokagathia requires self-control (enkrateia), which is needed to achieve freedom from external values (Mem.1.5.1). Xenophon's Socrates is not kaloskagathos because he is excellent at doing or knowing something, but because he aims to
'make his interlocutors better' through the practice of dialogue. Such enhancement implies an idea of kalokagathia that departs from traditional excellence (Mem. 2.1.1-7). Friendship and political benefits are also associated with Socratic kalokagathia: being a kaloskagathos entails being able to establish relationships based on reciprocity, all of which are aimed at the good of the city (Mem. 2.6.14-29). This paper examines all of these meanings of Socratic kalokagathia, as well as its connections with other fundamental ethical concepts of Xenophon (i.e., enkrateia, autarkeia and philia).

In antiquity, the debate about unwritten laws (agraphoi nomoi) intensified between the 5th and 4th centuries BC. This paper deals with unwritten laws in Sophocles' Antigone, in the famous Funeral Oration by Pericles reported by Thucydides, in the prosopopea of the laws displayed in Plato's Crito, and in Xenophon's Memorabilia and Oeconomicus. I claim that unwritten laws are distinct from positive law, but in some cases they overlap with it, in other cases they are counterposed to it. They are a provocation and a challenge to the traditional legal system: they are not explicitly codified, but possess absolute validity. A peculiar feature is that they only appear in the event of transgression: they do not belong to positive law because their power is not coercive, but only punitive.

This paper is structured in two parts. The first part (“Attualità della ricerca sulle passioni in Platone”, p. 9-17), written by Francesco Benoni, is a state of the art on emotions in Greek philosophy (and in particular in Plato). The second part (“Come governare le passioni di Socrate? Platone e I suoi antagonisti”, p. 17-27), authored by Alessandro Stavru, deals with Plato’s portrayal of Socrates’ passions. Benoni points out that the studies devoted to emotions in Plato are not numerous (the first book devoted to the topic being the collection edited by L. Candiotto and O. Renaut in 2020). The prevailing opinion is that “there is no such thing as a concept of emotion in Plato”. Hence the importance to devote attention to this topic, paying attention to the contexts in which Plato deals with emotions in specific dialogues. Stavru shows how Plato’s Socrates, not unlike the Socrates that emerges from Aristoxenus, Phaedo and Xenophon, is dominated by strong emotions, which he is able to control. In both Symposium and Charmides, the virtue by which such control is possible is sophrosune. The paper shows that sophrosune appears to be the most important virtue related to the control of passions also in other works of the Platonic corpus (until Laws).

Towards the end of the Protagoras, several pages are devoted to pleasure (351b3-359a1). Here Plato discusses the concept of κρείττω ἑαυτοῦ, i.e., “being stronger than oneself”, and connects it to wisdom. He claims that knowledge is strong (ἰσχυρόν), and therefore able to dominate over pleasures (Prt. 352b4). As Gerasimos Santas has aptly pointed out, Plato uses here a “language of strength” to define knowledge (352a1-355d5), then he defines this very knowledge as a measuring art without hinting at its strength (355d6-357c1); finally, he reverts to the language of strength and claims that knowledge qua measuring art is stronger than pleasure (357c1-358c3). This suggests that the Protagoras is far from being “intellectualistic,” as many have claimed. It is not a dialogue about knowledge, but about a special kind of it: the strong knowledge, which is the only remedy against akrasia. This calls to mind Antisthenes, who claims that virtue acquired through wisdom yields happiness, but needs Socratic strength (ἰσχύς). This peculiar kind of strength cannot be learned, since it is unique to Socrates. In this chapter, I claim that it is only thanks to such Socratic iskhus that the knowledge of the Protagoras is able to rule over, and not be ruled by, passions.

This paper deals with the accounts of the most significant attestations of seriousness (spoude), ridiculous (geloion) and playfulness (padia) occurring in the Corpus Platonicum. These notions form an almost inextricable jumble. Understanding the links between them is essential to grasp some core features of Plato’s thought: the serio-comic structure of the genre he employs, the dialogue; the role of the dialogue in the search for knowledge; and the serio-comic and serious-playful ambivalences of his main character Socrates. The aim of this paper is to shed light on these connections.

This paper tackles a much-discussed passage of Aristophanes’ Birds, in which Socrates is depicted as a psuchagogos, a conjurer of souls. This is the only passage in Socratic literature in which such an activity is attributed to Socrates. In Clouds, which was staged nine years prior to Birds, Aristophanes defines Socrates’ school as the ‘thinkery of wise souls’, and the endeavors of his pupils as a ‘taking care’ of their own souls: but what Socrates specifically does with the souls of his pupils is not clear. For this, we have to look to Birds, and in particular to verses 1553-1564. I first discuss the passage itself and how it relates to the comedy as a whole, then I provide a reading of parallel passages from the Clouds and Pythagorean literature, before finally returning to the verses in the Birds to draw some conclusions.

In this paper, I deal with Walter Friedrich Otto’s writings on Socrates, most of which are yet unpublished. According to Otto, Socrates’ doctrine of the soul has strong religious implications. Both in Plato and Xenophon the virtuous soul implies a relationship with the divine nature of mankind. The soul at its best, i.e. the wise soul, allows a dialogical exchange with another soul, which functions as a mirror in which one can recognize her own divine perfection (Alc. I). The soul becomes excellent when it becomes aware of its own virtue and intelligence. It is thanks to this awareness that the soul recognizes itself as divine and perfect, thus achieving the ‘improvement’ the Socratic care of the soul aims at (Pl., Apol.).

Several passages of the first-generation Socratics (Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Aristippus, Phaedo) suggest that the link between pleasure and pain plays a key role in Socratic ethics. This paper aims to examine these texts by connecting them to two anecdotal traditions focusing on Socrates's experience of pain: a) the tradition on Socrates's cloak, his habit of walking barefoot both in summer and in winter; and b) the tradition on Xanthippe, whose harshness Socrates bears for the paideutic benefits deriving from it. What I aim to demonstrate is that in Socrates and the first-generation Socratics pleasure is strictly connected to self-control, the renunciation to pleasure and, in some cases, also to the deliberate choice to endure pain.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the classical philologist Walter Friedrich Otto (1874-1958) and the philosopher Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991) in the post-war period. Although after World War II Otto and Grassi were not as close as they used to be in the 1940s, they went on cooperating on a variety of topics until the late 1950s. Otto's views on humanism depend on his theory of Greek myth, whereas for Grassi myth is key to understanding the individuum as a living reality, which is counterposed to  the illusory of technology. In his later writings, Grassi will abandon this view, and confine his interest for ancient myth to his studies on metaphor.

The Eikones of Philostratus the Elder describe a gallery of paintings located in Naples. While the text does not feature the term ekphrasis (description), that of sapheneia (clarity) occurs at the end of the Proem. The Eikones are centered around both ekphrasis and sapheneia: Philostratus does not just aim at "describing" objects of art, but at producing verbal images that overlap with reality, thus taking the place of the pictorial works he refers to. In this way, the Eikones are indeed a paradigmatic example of ekphrasis: it consists of a fictitious world of verbal images, whose vividness and persuasiveness bring the described artistic media “before the eyes” of the audience.

In Greek literature the words physiognomy and ekphrasis never occur together: the first occurrence of the noun physiognomonia is in the Hippocratic corpus, namely in Epidemics 2.5.1, a treatise dating back to the end of the fifth century BC; while for the first technical occurrence of ekphrasis as a description of “persons, animated and inanimated things, occasions and places” we have to wait until much later: it occurs only in the first century AD, in the preliminary exercises for the training of orators, the Progymnasmata of the Alexandrian sophist Aelius Theon. We have, for sure, plenty of texts dealing with physiognomy from the Homeric epoch onwards, and we have, also from Homer onwards, ecphrastic texts describing persons, animated and inanimated things, occasions and places. This means that both practices – that of physiognomy and that of ekphrasis – exist in Graeco-Roman literatures much earlier than, and independently from, their explicit theorization. One could even go further and say that physiognomic and ecphrastic passages occur throughout Greek and Latin literature, and that their importance lies in the rhetorical effect they produce on the audience, not in the theories that have been conceived in order to explain them.
Still, we face a major problem: can we associate at all the two practices of physiognomy and ekphrasis? This is a tricky question, since we do not have texts that problematize physiognomy and ekphrasis in the same context, or that establish an explicit relationship between them. What we do have is a series of texts from Aristotle to the Second Sophistic in which physiognomical and ecphrastic matters are treated in a way that makes plausible, in not altogether likely, the existence of a reciprocal connection between the two issues. This chapter focuses on the first group of texts that deal with physiognomy and ekphrasis, written either by Aristotle or by his immediate pupils, and with texts roughly belonging to the philosophical and rhetoric movement of the Second Sophistic. We shall see that both groups of texts tackle on the one hand ecphrastic issues that square with the theoretical requirements of physiognomy, on the other physiognomical matters that seem to entail an ecphrastic mode of description. This entails that physiognomy is in itself an ecphrastic practice grounded in rhetorical theory, and that, conversely, the ecphrastic description of persons relies to a great extent on the empirical data of physiognomical analysis.

This paper deals with phainesthai, dokein and aletheia In Plato’s Republic. At II, 378a–383c, “truth” is defined by a juxtaposition with a “falsehood” consisting in a deceptive appearance of things. Phainesthai is therefore a characteristic feature of the objects belonging to the lowest level of knowledge. This does not entail, however, that phainesthai should be understood as a mere error or deception.  At X, 596d–601b, appearance is linked to mimesis. Here it has a much wider meaning than in Book II of the Republic. At VI, 510a– VII, 532c, Plato stresses how the ascent to the ideas takes place within the phainesthai/dokein of the visible. Each step undertaken by the dialektikē technē is related to different ontologic “appearances” of things. The visibility arising from the phainesthai of things is therefore both mimetic (concealing truth) and ontologic (showing that very truth).

In this paper, I provide a review of the published and unpublished work of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s favourite student, Horst Künkler (1936-2008). Künkler wrote his PhD with Gadamer and Köhler in Heidelberg in 1965, on the reception of Aristotelian mimesis in French Classicism. Under the influence of Karl Löwith, Künkler wrote important works on philosophers such as Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, but also on writers such as Pirandello, Molière, Kleist, and especially Paul Celan. In the 70s he moved to Naples, where he became full professor at the University “L’Orientale”. Here he taught courses on Cusanus, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Ricoeur. But he also kept working on poets and writers, i.e. 17th century French playwrights, Hölderlin, Kleist, Rilke, Kafka and Celan. Among Künkler’s most valuable unpublished works is the “Analytics of appearance”, a monograph on which he worked for three decades: here he discusses Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace, which he examines in the light of Western philosophical tradition (from Plato to Aristotle, up to Kant and Hegel, reaching until Heidegger).

This paper aims to shed new light on the physiognomy of Socrates by comparatively examining Plato's and Xenophon’s passages on the topic. A comparative analysis of these texts is of primary importance for understanding the reception of Socrates’ physiognomy in antiquity, inasmuch as subsequent literary and visual depictions of Socrates almost completely depend on them. The first part of the paper deals with the Silenus motif in Plato and Xenophon: this motif describes a peculiar feature which defines what Socrates is, i.e., his seriocomicness. But Plato and Xenophon also provide other motifs that describe what Socrates does, how he behaves, and which skills he is famous for. These motifs are zoomorphic: Xenophon compares Socrates with a crab; Plato compares him with a bull, a pelican, young female Laconian hounds, a torpedo ray, and a gadfly. This “Socratic bestiary” provides a wealth of information
about Socrates’ activity as a philosopher—and even as a young talented
ephebe, still far from getting acquainted to philosophy: Socrates had a charismatic gaze, which was at times menacing, at times magnetic; he was able to track down arguments even before getting acquainted with philosophy; he would benumb his interlocutor with confusing arguments; and he would stir up his fellow citizens, reproaching and persuading them not to stick to their convictions.
However, Plato and Xenophon do not provide a physiognomic diagnosis in the strict sense: as the paper shows, Plato's and Xenophon's interest in Socrates’ appearance is not physiognomic, but philosophical.

In traditional scholarship, Aristoxenus’ Life of Socrates has been considered very often as an untrustworthy testimony, as the Socrates being described seems to be at odds with what we know about him by our main sources Plato and Xenophon. Recent reassessments, however, note that Aristoxenus’ account provides a balanced picture of Socrates, which is not at odds with earlier Socratic literature. This chapter follows this more positive hypothesis. It reviews all fragments available in the extant editions of Aristoxenus’ Life of Socrates, and provides new texts not included in these collections. I show that Aristoxenus’ characterization of Socrates as an irascible, sex-driven man who eradicates his licentiousness through education is widely confirmed: not only by Aristotle and other Peripatetics, but implicitly also by Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Phaedo, and other Socratics. Both the account based on Aristoxenus’ father Spintharus, who knew Socrates personally, and the report about Socrates’ youthful association with Archelaus, the historical reliability of which has been shown by recent studies, give us good reasons to claim that Aristoxenus had solid grounds for depicting Socrates the way he did.

In Plato’s Republic the link between phainesthai and alētheia is of utmost importance. In different passages “truth” is defined by a juxtaposition with a “falsehood” consisting in a deceptive appearance of things. Phainesthai is therefore a characteristic feature of the objects belonging to the lowest level of knowledge. This does not entail, however, that phainesthai should be understood as a mere error or deception. Its meaning is in fact much wider, and not only a negative one. Plato stresses how the whole ascent to the ideas takes place within the phainesthai of the visible. Each step undertaken by the dialektikē technē is related to different ontologic “appearances” of things. The visibility arising from the phainesthai of things is therefore both mimetic (concealing truth) and ontologic (showing that very truth). This paper deals with both these aspects and shows their complementarity in Plato’s polyvalent use of phainesthai.

This paper focuses on the reciprocity between visual and verbal that characterizes ancient ekphrasis. According to the authors of the Progymnasmata (Aelius Theon, Hermogenes, Nicolaus, Aphtonius), a major feature of ekphrasis is its vividness (enargeia), i.e. its ability to "bring before the eyes" what is absent.  Ekphrasis is not aimed at the imitation of a given object, but at the effect this very object produces on the audience. This ecphrastic shift, according to which the fictive object is more vivid, and hence more persuasive, than the real object, is a key feature of Philostratus' Eikones. Philostratus himself defines his own work as a logos graphes, i.e. as a "speech on verbal images," which is paradigmatic for the mutual dependence between visual and verbal in ancient ekphrasis.

In this paper, Japanese aesthetics is interpreted as an aesthetics of surface. I show how Japanese aesthetics deals with exteriority, and is therefore counterposed to Western aesthetics, which is focused on the relationship between interiority (pathos or ethos) and exteriority (eidos or species).
A variety of aspects of the Japanese culture relates to an aesthetics of surface: the visual arts, gagaku music, the art of archery, the perception of nature, the ephemeral architecture crafted in bamboo and paper (or of the tea-houses and gardens), the culture of thermal baths and the white skin, the culture of raw food, the devotion to the first daylight, and the Shinto gods.
The Japanese aesthetics of surface bears however also controversial aspects. These come to the fore in the ambiguous relationship between the Japanese and the Western cultures. In the final part of the paper, I claim that Japan has mostly absorbed the surface of Western culture, without dealing with its core values and aesthetic ideas.

This paper focuses on a famous passage of Plato’s Symposium (216c-221b) which deals with Socrates’s endurance (karteria). I argue that Plato counterposes Socrates’s karteria to Alcibiades’s lack of karteria, and that the paideutic tension of the passage relies precisely on this counterposition. A core feature of Plato’s account of Socratic karteria is its connection to practical wisdom (phronesis): endurance can become a virtue only if it is accompanied by understanding. Socrates’s  uniqueness depends on the combination of karteria and phronesis, which becomes most evident in the episodes of his rescues of Alcibiades and Laches (220d-221a). This link between karteria and phronesis reminds of Antisthenes, who claims that a virtuous life requires not only effort (philoponia) and self-restraint (enkrateia), but also wisdom (sophia) and education (paideia) (SSR V A 126 and 208). Xenophon has a different view: according to him, only enkrateia leads to knowledge and wisdom, while karteria does not (Mem. 1.5.4-5 and 4.8.11). Plato’s account of karteria seems therefore much closer to Antisthenes than to Xenophon.

This short paper deals with Parmenides' fragments B1 (28-32) and B8 (51-61). I claim that Parmenides' doxa is intrinsically ambivalent, being on the one hand 'deception', on the other 'appearance'. A number of passages of later authors, who seem to draw on Parmenides, seems to confirm this: Plato, Resp. V 477a-480a; Aristoteles, Metaph. A 986b28-33; Theophrastus Phys. I; Simplicius, In Arist. Phys. IX 38, 20-28 Diels, and In Arist. De cael. VII 557, 21-23 Heiberg. In fact, the terms used by Parmenides bear such ambivalence especially at B1, 28-32, where the semantic affinity between doxa, dokounta, and dokimos is patent.

This paper provides an ecphrastic reading of a well-known chapter of Xenophon's Memorabilia (III 10). In this passage, Socrates discusses about painting, sculpture, and cuirass making with three artists: the painter Parrhasius, the sculptor Cleiton (who has been identified with Polycleitus), and the cuirass maker Pistias. A common thread of these conversations lies in a concept of art which goes back to a Pythagorean pattern, and which relies on the notions of symmetria and harmonia. These two features can be spotted also in the much-discussed statue of Augustus found at Prima Porta. Here, the three arts displayed at Xenoph. Mem. III 10, are mutually interrelated. The hypothesis of this paper is that the sculptor (or the atelier of sculptors) who conceived the Augustus of Prima Porta may have relied on, or even been influenced by, the passage of Xenophon's Memorabilia. Thus the statue of Prima Porta may be understood as an iconic description of Xenophon's passage.

This paper focuses on Ernst Jünger’s essay The Peace (Der Friede). It deals with the basic tenet of the Friedensschrift, i.e. that the worst is war, the stabler is the peace that ensues from it. According to Jünger, peace is the result of the atrocities of war: therefore, the more these are painful, the more fruitful is the subsequent peace. In fact, Jünger claims that peace can only be stable after World War II, which was a war of unprecedented brutality that involved the whole planet. World War II was an ideological conflict aimed at annihilating the enemy, whereas all preceding wars (including World War I), were aimed at conquering territory, or at seizing other peoples’ or nations’ goods. Hence Jünger’s major claim: peace can arise only from an “aesthetics of terror”, i.e. an accurate phenomenology of all atrocities a war brings with it.

Another issue dealt with in the paper is the composition date of the Friedensschrift. Jünger wrote the first version of the Peace (the Urfriede) in 1941, and then reworked it a number of times, until the final version was published in 1945. The published version allows to distinguish the different layers of the work, thus providing important hints in determining which parts of it he wrote when he was an official of the Wehrmacht, and which ones he composed after the fall of the Reich, when he sought to redeem himself from the allegations of militarism and proximity to the Nazi regime he had to deal with in the post-war years.

This paper provides an overview of the literature on Socrates and the first-generation Socratics that appeared from 2010 up to the Socratica III conference (in 2012). In these years, scholarly activities on Socrates have constantly increased, leading to variegated and dynamic scholarship. Approaches, methodologies, sometimes even the topics are new and original, thus enriching and refreshing a whole field of studies. The paper deals with the scholarship on the literary context of the logoi sokratikoi, the figure of Socrates in Aristophanes and Old Comedy, Antisthenes, Xenophon, and of course Plato.

This paper deals with kalokagathia, a specific Socratic virtue Xenophon focuses on in his Socratic as well as in his non-Socratic works. According to Xenophon, the most important feature of kalokagathia is reciprocity: it is the charismatic virtue of a leader (e.g. Socrates, Cyrus, Agesilaus) who is able to restrain himself and, thanks to his living example, to have his followers become better. Kalokagathia is closely linked to friendship (philia), as every proper friendship entails “making better” one’s own friend. Philia can therefore happen only among kaloikagathoi, and kalokagathia is the most important of all collective virtues: it applies not only to Socrates and his pupils (as in the Memorabilia), but also to every household (as in the Oeconomicus), and even to those in charge of the economy of a polis (as in the Poroi).

This paper focuses on ecphrastic patterns in Philostratus the Elder’s most known work, the Imagines. I claim that the Imagines have a specific rhetorical character, and have to be understood as a verbal creation independent from actual visual models. This work is, as Philostratus points out, a graphe, a “drawing/painting”, i.e. a literary and visual description/depiction of fictive paintings. The ambivalence of the term graphe (which occurs some 130 times in the Imagines) is at the core of Philostratus' ecphrastic account, as entails from passages in which he defines his own work as a logos graphes, a “discourse on the word-painting” (1.25.1, 2.13.2, 2.14.1). I argue that Philostratus' ekphraseis involve not only the author/narrator, i.e. the “internal” audience (the Sophist and the boy), and the reader, i.e. the “external” audience; they involve also the figures of the pictures described, whose realism deceives both the “internal” and the “external” audiences. Such interaction of different fictional levels is particularly evident in the description of the Narcissus painting, where verbal and pictorial fiction are mingled, and the border between illusion and reality becomes ambiguous.

This paper tackles the vexed question of the sources of Vitruvius's De Architectura. A series of passages of De Architectura show affinities with the Pythagorean notions of harmony and number proportions. In these passages the concepts of symmetria and eurhythmia, both of which Vitruvius draws from his Greek (probably Microasiatic) sources, are of utmost importance. Both of these concepts imply very specific understandings of an illusionistic mimesis that Aristotle defines as a "mimesis of numbers" (Met. A 987b) typical of Pythagoreanism. Philolaus of Croton seems to rely on this very idea when he states that "all things have a number, without which their knowledge is impossible" (fr. B4). Vitruvius's De Architectura may in turn rely on this idea, directly or, more probably, through the mediation of other authors.

This paper focuses on the relationship between Walter Friedrich Otto (1874-1958) and Karl Kerényi (1897-1973). It explores their correspondence after World War II as well as other pieces of evidence: as both Otto’s and Kerényi’s Nachlässe suffered substantial destruction in 1944, the reconstruction of their relationship before 1946 requires scrutiny of documents dealing with their pre-War relationship (such as Otto’s a and Kerényi’s personal diaries). Otto and Kerényi met in 1929 in Greece, and had an intense scientific interchange until Otto’s death in 1958. From 1936 to 1938 they both participated to the Doorner Arbeitsgemeinschaft, a series of meetings that took place once in a year in Doorn (Holland), at the private Villa of the exiled Emperor of Germany Wilhelm II. Their common interests led them to work on similar topics (e.g. Dionysus, Hölderlin, Socrates), and even if Kerényi temporarily distanced himself from Otto’s Winckelmann-inspired interpretation of Greek religion in his book “Hermes der Seelenführer” (1942), his admiration for Otto remained unscathed through the years. At Otto’s death, Kerényi wrote a number of obituaries in which he bears testimony of the “wesentliche Gemeinschaft” that characterized their relationship.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the German philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958) and the Italian philosopher Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991). Otto and Grassi met in 1939, and developed an intense collaboration until 1945. Grassi involved Otto in a series of projects aimed at reviving the values of Classic antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Together they edited a Yearbook on the "spiritual tradition" (Geistige Überlieferung), two issues of which appeared before the publication of the journal was terminated after Italy's backing out from the alliance with Germany in September 1943. The paper dwells on the different aims Grassi and Otto pursued in their attempt to revive "humanistic" values. Both Grassi and Otto understood this revival in response to the "nihilism" of German philosophy: Grassi draws on authors of the "Italian tradition", i.e. Dante, L. Bruni, G. Bruno, G.B. Vico,  while Otto focuses on Greek antiquity (Tyrtaeus) and F. Hölderlin. Another major topic of the paper is the political context of Grassi's and Otto's interpretations of Humanism, both of which encountered the hostility of the Nazi regime (albeit for different reasons).

This paper focuses on the book "Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt" [The spirit of Antiquity and the Christian World], published by the German philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958) in 1923. In this book, Otto provides a critique of "Judaeochristianity" which has many traits in common with Friedrich Nietzsche's view on the topic in his "On the Genealogy of Morality" (1887). The paper dwells on the cultural background of Otto's interpretation: Otto lines up with Nietzsche and other authors of the Weimarer Republik (such as Spengler and Klages) in attributing the decline of Greek Antiquity (and of the Western civilization) to the rise of "Judaeochristianity." After 1923, Otto distanced himself from this view, and refused to republish this book - which is nonetheless of scholarly interest, since here we find an interpretation of Greek religion Otto would fully develop six years later in his most famous work, the "Homeric Gods" of 1929.

This afterword provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the context in which the German philologist Walter F. Otto conceived his book on Dionysus (1933). This book appeared within the series of the “Frankfurter Studien zur Religion und Kultur der Antike”, of which Otto was the editor from 1932 to 1938. The series had the programmatic aim of “paving the way for a new overall view of Greek and Roman antiquity.” Otto pursues this aim in the first part of the book , which is devoted to “myth and cult.” In the second part of the book, Otto endeavours to show that a study of the god Dionysus is particularly suited to understanding the relationship between myth and cult. Otto claims that the relation between the myth and the cult of Dionysus is mimetic: the deeds of Dionysus’ followers, especially the Maenads, imitate those of their god (as is evident also from the fact that the Maenades viz. Bakchai derive their name from their Lord Mainomenos viz. Bakchos). Dionysus is the god of the coincidence of myth and cult, and hence of immediacy, as entails from his characterization as a god of masks (Maskengott). Otto develops this aspect following very probably upon a suggestion of Martin Heidegger, with whom he had discussed about the epiphanic nature of Dionysus shortly after 1929. Other aspects of Dionysus Otto deals with are his “oppositeness” (Gegensätzlichkeit) and his Greek origin, both of which have been widely discussed in later studies. These aspects, but especially that of the Greek vs. the "Oriental" origin of the god (which Otto had been the first to claim after scholars such as Welcker, Nietzsche, Rohde, Wilamowitz, Kern, Nilsson, and Deubner), make this book a milestone in the study of Dionysus.

This paper focuses on Socrates’ prayer to Pan featured at the conclusion of Plato’s Phaedrus (279b-c). The riddling character of this prayer has been pointed out by most scholars, who have variously attempted to identify the things Socrates prays for (i.e., 1. “Make the inward things be beautiful;” 2. “Make whatever outward things I hold be in harmony with those that are within me;” 3. “May I understand that only the wise is rich;” 4. “May my pile of gold be of a size which a moderate man could not bear nor carry away”). I claim that Socrates is praying only for the first two things (1. and 2.), and that what follows (3. and 4.) should be understood as an explanation of those requests. In fact, at 1. and 2. (optative aorist plural) he speaks to the divinities of the place, while at 3. and 4. (optative present singular) he is either speaking to Phaedrus or to himself, commenting upon the prayers he has just uttered. Socrates’s requests aim at obtaining sophrusune (temperance) instead of sophia (wisdom): this matches with the fact that almost all other occurrences of sophia in the Phaedrus have a sarcastic (if not altogether negative) flavour. Passages from other dialogues of Plato (Theaetetus, Phaedo, Symposium), Phaedo (Zopyrus) and Xenophon (Symposium) confirm the key role of sophrosyne with regard to Socrates’s outward appearance: in all of these passages, Socrates’s physiognomy seems to fulfill his prayer of the Phaedrus, visualizing his extraordinary ability to restrain himself.

This paper tackles the different accounts of Pythagorean number theory propounded by Aristotle in Metaphysics A. Contrary to what most scholars assume, i.e., that Aristotle provides here three different accounts of Pythagorean number (namely: 1. ‘Things are numbers’; 2. ‘The Pythagoreans assimilate things to numbers’; 3. ‘The elements of things are the origin of things’), I claim that in Met. A Aristotle endorses at least ten different theses on Pythagorean number, and that such a variety of theses (some of which do explicitly contradict each other) testifies of his difficulty in dealing with the issue. It appears that in dealing with Pythagorean number theory Aristotle sticks to his heuristic method of starting from the things “better known to us” to reach the things “more knowable in itself.” In fact, Aristotle begins by tackling Pythagorean number from the viewpoint of his own philosophy (i.e. “numbers are principles”, 985b-986a), and then gradually departs from such viewpoint in order to get closer to the Pythagorean perspective – which is the most difficult to understand for him, as entails from the way he criticizes it  (i.e. “numbers imitate things”, 987b or “numbers are the things themselves”, 997b and 990a). The final paragraph of the paper deals with Philolaus’ account of number, which provides useful hints to solve the difficulties Aristotle struggles with in Met. A. For Philolaus, number is the way things appear, i.e. what makes them accessible to knowledge and thought (fr. 8). It seems that it precisely this aspect of number what poses the greatest problems to Aristotle, whose ontological premises are incapable of grasping the epiphenomenic reality of Pythagorean number.

This paper provides a state of the art of the modern literature dealing with Socrates and the Socratic literature, spanning a period that covers from Schleiermacher (1818) up to the Socratica II conference (2010). When Plato started writing dialogues, presumably shortly after 399 BC , his elder companions such as Antisthenes or Aeschines enjoyed a far better status . Fifty years later, in 350, the situation had completely changed, as the superiority of Plato – of his writings as well as of his school – was an undisputed matter of fact. To explain such an abrupt change it is necessary to suppose that a process took place, in which Plato gradually established himself as the leading Socratic. In this period of time his ideas had to challenge those of his companions, bringing about a powerful philosophical struggle—of which the testimonies of the logoi give only a glimpse. Understanding Plato’s ideas means therefore acknowledging the context in which they developed and eventually emerged as the most prominent. In other words, a closer look at the theoretical issues of the “minor” Socratics is necessary for a true and full acknowledgement of Plato’s work.

This paper examines a passage of Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.10) in which Socrates discusses about the meaning of painting and sculpture with two very competent interlocutors: the famous painter Parrhasius and the sculptor Cleiton (who might be identified with the renowned Polycleitus). According to Socrates, painting is able to represents someone’s ethos, while sculpture expresses pathos. This passage shows Xenophon’s acquaintance with the Sophists’ writings (i.e. Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen) as well as with technical handbooks on art (such as Polycleitus’s Canon). It shows also Xenophon’s ability to deal with these issues from a theoretical viewpoint. I claim that the subtle terminological distinctions Xenophons employs to describe the expressive features of both painting and sculpture demonstrate his ability to discuss from a philosophical viewpoint issues that were widely debated in his time. Memorabilia 3.10 provides therefore a very good example of Xenophon’s philosophical skills, which since Schleiermacher (1818) have often been doubted by modern scholars.

This paper provides a close reading of the paragraphs 8-14 of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen. I claim that this passage focuses on logos and its capacity of “producing appearance” (phainesthai poiein). Gorgias distinguishes between three kinds of logoi: the meteorological, the judicial, and the philosophical ones. All of them owe their persuasiveness to their ability to substitute reality with a seductive illusion (that of “opinion”, doxa), which brings about strong emotions without being itself an emotion. On the contrary, Gorgian logos is in itself rational, argumentative, and therefore able to make manifest the things that appear obscure or unknowledgeable.

In this brief note, I pinpoint what I take to be one of the most important achievements of Mario Montuori’s interpretation of Socrates: his idea of the “amphibology” of the Socratic dialogue. This idea implies that the Socratic dialogue has basically two addressees: on the one hand, the Athenian people who condemned Socrates to death in 399; on the other, the friends and followers of Socrates. Montuori claims that in 399 the Socratics were in fact found guilty together with their teacher, as some of them had been identified with the youth Socrates had allegedly corrupted (which is particularly evident in the cases of Alcibiades and Critias). The Socratic dialogue is therefore amphibologic because it aims to defend Socrates in front of the Athenian people while at the same time it endeavors to pass on, albeit in a hidden way, Socrates’s teachings to his followers.

In this paper, I endeavor to show that Carl Schmitt's famous definition of nomos is crucial for a critical discussion of the political and ideological assumptions underlying the Barcelona process. The paper primarily deals with Schmitt's essay "Land und Meer" (1942), which precedes the more renowned "Der Nomos der Erde" (1950). In "Land und Meer," Schmitt offers an interpretation of geo-political history as a history of the conflict between land and sea. According to Schmitt, such history begins in the "sea surrounded by land," i.e. the Mediterranean. Schmitt considers European history as the result of conflicts between land and sea powers, i.e. between the Persians and the Greeks,  between Sparta and Athens, between Rome and Carthage, between the Byzantine Empire/Venice and the Turcs, and, in modern times, between the sea powers Spain/Portugal/England and the land powers France/Prussia (Germany). Nowadays, even if no conflicts are taking place at the heart of the EU, the Mediterranean is still the source of issues that menace Europe's political and economic stability. Hence the dilemma tackled in this paper: should Europe still look at its own "spatial nomos," i.e. the Mediterranean and its ensuing problems, or otherwise draw on an Atlantic nomos, and therefore stick to NATO and US policies? Is such an alternative viable or only empty rhetoric, given the economic and military relationships that bind European countries to the United States?

This paper takes the cue from the controversy that ensued in 2005 after the conservative Danish daily Jyllands-Posten posted satyrical cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic critics regarded the cartoons as a deliberate provocation and insult to their religious beliefs, while the editors of the Danish newspaper and part of the non-Islamic public opinion defended the cartoons as a freedom of expression issue. I endeavour to contribute to the debate by focusing on one hand on the (not fulfilled) role of Europe in the dialogue with the Islamic World (and in particular with the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries, as part of the EU’s foreign policy), on the other, on the ambivalent use of the image in the three Abrahamic monotheisms Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, while explicitly forbidden by the respective holy books, representations of the divine occur in all three monotheisms – and especially in Christianity and Islam, a main feature of which seems to consist in a dialectic between “iconoduly” and “iconoclasm.”

This paper tackles the renowned passage of the Memorabilia in which Xenophon deals with the "unwritten laws" (agraphoi nomoi), i.e. 4.4.19-25. The first part of the paper analyses the passage and expounds the different approaches to it in modern scholarship (Dümmler, Joël, A. Döring, Maier, Rudberg, Strauss, Striker, Morrison, Dorion, Narcy, Johnson). The second part of the paper  dwells on Walter Friedrich Otto's unpublished writings on this issue. According to Otto, the agraphoi nomoi are a core notion for understanding the religious background of Socrates' moral thought, as they entail a trust in "the divine structure of being," i.e., as Otto puts it, in the correspondence between the knowledge of the good and its beneficial results (ophelimon, chresimon).

This yet unpublished manuscript sheds light on the relationship between the ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) and the philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958). Frobenius and Otto became close friends a couple of years after their first “official” contact in 1924 (when Otto made possible the transfer of Frobenius’ Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie from Munich to Frankfurt, as well his appointment to honorary professor in 1932 and, in 1935, to director of the municipal Museum für Völkerkunde). Their personal friendship was at the core of the “Religionswissenschaftliche Frankfurter Schule”, in which eminent scholars took part in the decade 1924-1934. The scientific and personal background of the relationship Frobenius-Otto is well documented in this manuscript, which strikes both for its immediacy and scholarly interest.

This very short, yet unpublished talk of the Hungarian Classicist and Historian of Religions Karl Kerényi (1897-1973) was held in Tübingen, in occasion of Walter F. Otto’s eightieth birthday. The manuscript is probably uncomplete, and differs significantly from similar biographical sketches Kerényi dedicated to Otto (e.g., in “Paideuma” 6, 1954, 1-5). The manuscript focuses on the link between Otto’s interpretation of Greek religion and modern science (e.g. Max Planck).

This book is the Italian translation of the so far unpublished course on "Socrates and the Greek Man" held by the German philologist Walter F. Otto (1874-1958) in Fall 1943 in Königsberg. It is the first course Otto lectured on Socrates, and it focuses on the following subjects: the life of Socrates, his trial and death, his "knowledge" ethics as opposed to "will" ethics, and the Socratic intellectualism. The editor preface focuses on the scholarly context of Otto's interpretation of Socrates (which draws on the studies of the Scottish scholars J. Burnet and A.E. Taylor), and dwells on the political meaning Otto attributed to Socrates's rejection of the ethics of knowledge. By actualizing Socrates's moral intellectualism, Otto is critical against every political ideology based on will and therefore, implicitly, against the Nazi regime.

This yet unpublished manuscript is one of the few extant writings of Walter Friedrich Otto dealing with Zeus. It dates back to the late 1940s, when Otto was reconsiderating his view of the Greek Olympian Gods, a topic on which he had already written two major monographs (“The Greek Gods”, in 1929, and “Dionysus”, in 1933). In those years, Otto pursued the project of writing a book on Zeus. Although this book never appeared, Otto wrote on Zeus in a variety of occasions. This manuscript is the most complete of these writings. Zeus is described as the “form of forms”, i.e., as the manifestation of the divine in which all different manifestations of the Greek gods converge. According to Otto, such a manifestation is the result of a major event in Greek religion, a “metamorphose” in the way gods reveal themselves to humanity. From Hesiod onwards, the Greek gods are not anymore the expression of the powers of nature: they become the manifestation of absolute perfection – i.e. of an “anthropomorphism” which is at the same time a “theomorphism”, a revelation of nature through the beauty of a divine human form.

This paper features two so far unpublished manuscripts by Walter F. Otto on Socrates’s “knowledge ethics.” Otto wrote them in the 1940s, and used them most probably for oral presentations he delivered in those years. The manuscripts touch upon the key issues of Otto’s interpretation of Socrates’s moral intellectualism: the equivalence of the good and the beneficial, the ensuing optimistic faith in reason, and the religious background of Greek (and Socratic) knowledge ethics. According to Otto, there is an immediate correspondence between Socrates’s knowledge of the good and the practical effects of it: what is “good” from a moral viewpoint is good also from a practical viewpoint. Socrates is optimistic about ethical knowledge, since he believes that such knowledge will unavoidably lead to moral behaviour, and that moral behaviour will in turn yield beneficial results (i.e., he believes that voluntary wrongdoing is impossible). Socratic knowledge ethics is therefore deeply rooted in reality, from which entails that it has also a divine origin. Otto maintains that since Archaic times Greek ethics was connected to the worship of divinities (like Aidos, Themis, Dike, and Nemesis). Long before Socrates, the Greeks were optimistic about the correspondence between the knowledge of good and its practical effects, as they believed in the divine benefits ensuing from the gods. In fact, Otto shows that the Greeks behaved ethically not by pursuing the right thing to do, but – in a truly Socratic way – by “knowing” what was good, i.e. by acknowledging the presence of morality in its divine appearance(s).

This paper collects unpublished manuscripts on Giambattista Vico and Friedrich Schelling by the German philologist Walter Friedrich Otto (1874-1958), most of which were written in the early 1930s. The manuscripts are edited in German with Italian translation, a commentary, and an introduction. They consist in a comparative analysis of Vico’s and Schelling’s interpretations of the origin of human civilization. Otto stresses that Vico’s approach is based on jurisprudence, while Schelling’s on philosophy. Otto deals extensively with Vico’s account of the origin of civilisation, focusing in particular on the sacred institution of marriage in ancient Roman Law. According to Otto, this institution does not found the community (as Vico claims), but presupposes it, since every marital union can exist only if legitimated by the gens and the gentilitial law. Schelling’s account of the origin of civilization has a different approach. Otto holds that Schelling recalls the construction of the tower of Babel to show that the confusion of languages hindered mankind to be part of a common civilization. Since it was God who created the dispersion of tongues, language(s) should be regarded as the mythical origin of civilization. Otto is explicit about his preference for Schelling’s interpretation, an author who played a major role in the seminal work on Greek religion, Dionysus (1933), which Otto wrote under the influence of Schelling. Despite his preference for Schelling, Otto went on dealing with Vico over the years: this paper features writings (most of which are fragmentary or short notes) on the following seminal topics of Vico's Scienza Nuova: verum-factum, probability, critique of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, the origin of religion, and political theory (= note on Witzenmann's book on Vico: Politischer Aktivismus und sozialer Mythos, 1935).

This round table is devoted to Hermeneutics. It is in memory of Riccardo Dottori and Gianni Vattimo–two great scholars who recently passed by. Both Dottori and Vattimo were close to Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated Gadamer’s monograph “Truth and Method” into the Italian, and made significant contributions to hermeneutics. The round table investigates the core features of today’s hermeneutics (interpretation of religious, literary and philosophical texts; the connection between understanding and communication, or between orality and writing as well as between verbal and non-verbal communication), paying special attention to how the “effected consciousness” (Wirkungsgeschichte) of any kind of interpretation relates to the establishment of “prejudices” as given facts. Important references for a correct engagement with interpretation is represented by Dottori’s notion of “Reflexion des Wirklichen” and Vattimo’s idea of “pensiero debole”: both of them are tackled in the round table.

The history of interpretations of Socrates covers the entire
span of the history of philosophy, ranging from the earliest
followers of Socrates – each of whom provided their own view
of Socratic philosophy – to the historiographical trends that
emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. The proposed round
table aims to discuss crucial highlights of this history: notably,
the speakers will address the following key moments: (1) the
(often conflicting) interpretations of the 5th-4th century
(Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato), as well as the scholarly
trends that stress the ‘interaction’ among the first-generation
Socratics and take into account the constraints of the literary
genres they employ; (2) the interpretation of Socratic
literature provided by major German and French scholars in
19th and 20th century (Schleiermacher, Gigon, Foucault, and
Hadot among others); (3) the image of Socrates as
reconstructed by the philosophical historiography of the late
20th century in Italy, with special regard to the studies of the
so-called ‘Roman school’ by Guido Calogero and Gabriele
Giannantoni; (4) the major interpretive trends of the mid- to
late 20th and early 21st centuries in the Anglophone world
and their application to the study of (Plato’s) Socrates (e.g.
analytic method, constructivist and anti-constructivist
approaches, the Straussian movement, literary interpretative
methods); (5) the recent Socratic literature in Portuguese and
Spanish.

With rare exceptions, Socratic studies and studies in the Greek theatre of the Fifth century rarely interact, due to institutional rather than scientific reasons, dictated by the separation of disciplines into departments, institutes and faculties. Yet Euripides and Aristophanes have much to tell us about the figure and the teaching of Socrates, both of which are present in their theatre in specific ways, codified by the history of the two dramatic genres. Thus, while in the comedy of Aristophanes Socrates wears the mask of a buffoon, in the tragedy of Euripides, though not on stage, he inspires complex dialogues on crucial ethical, religious and political issues. For these reasons, the study of Euripides and Aristophanes must tackle, on the one hand, a careful examination of the literature that flourished around Socrates after 399, on the other, the so-called pre-Socratic theories, which the character Socrates (in Aristophanes) or Socratic concepts (in Euripides) are associated with in their respective comedies and tragedies.
Thus, by using the complex prism through which such interactions become visible—philology, history of thought, theatre studies, reception studies—the present conference aims to initiate a fruitful dialogue between scholars of Socrates, Aristophanes, and Euripides.

With rare exceptions, Socratic studies and studies in the Greek theatre of the Fifth century rarely interact, due to institutional rather than scientific reasons, dictated by the separation of disciplines into departments, institutes and faculties. Yet Euripides and Aristophanes have much to tell us about the figure and the teaching of Socrates, both of which are present in their theatre in specific ways, codified by the history of the two dramatic genres. Thus, while in the comedy of Aristophanes Socrates wears the mask of a buffoon, in the tragedy of Euripides, though not on stage, he inspires complex dialogues on crucial ethical, religious and political issues. For these reasons, the study of Euripides and Aristophanes must tackle, on the one hand, a careful examination of the literature that flourished around Socrates after 399, on the other, the so-called pre-Socratic theories, which the character Socrates (in Aristophanes) or Socratic concepts (in Euripides) are associated with in their respective comedies and tragedies.
Thus, by using the complex prism through which such interactions become visible—philology, history of thought, theatre studies, reception studies—the present conference aims to initiate a fruitful dialogue between scholars of Socrates, Aristophanes, and Euripides.

Prior to the establishment of humoral medicine or scientific anatomy, one of the primary methods for divining the characteristics of an individual, whether inborn or temporary, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. Within the Mesopotamian tradition the linkage between external form and internal characteristics was only a small part of an encompassing approach to predicting future conditions on the basis of presently visible signs (omens). We will focus on two types of written literature in Mesopotamia: the physiognomic omina and descriptions of skin diseases in the medical tradition. These two genres link skin ailments or other physical deformities to both physical and non-physical, i.e. social, consequences, including illness and death, but also wealth/poverty, the well-being of one’s family or success at court.
In addition to the standard physiognomic compendia, visual and literary representations of the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Pericles, Socrates or Augustus provide useful insights into the interrelation of different iconic media in the Graeco-Roman world. In the Socratic tradition and especially in the Peripatus, physiognomic discussions became intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. Roman rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian applied these studies to rhetorical theory, and in the Second Sophistic the interaction between physiognomic features and their ekphrastic description reached its climax (Lucian, Callistratus, and the two Philostrati).
The Syriac and Arabic compendial cultures that grew out of the scientific pursuits of Graeco-Roman period Hellenism absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions. Not surprisingly, in the Arabic scientific tradition we find both the traditional Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the links between physiognomy and characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. These materials were then included in different types of compilations and compendia, from the malhama materials of Bar Bahlul to the explicit linkage of physiognomy and humoral temperaments found in Hunayn’s annotations on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica.
The workshop will consist of both talks and reading sessions; speakers include, amongst others, A. Ghersetti (Venice), N.P. Heeßel (Würzburg), M. Popovi© (Groningen) and M. M. Sassi (Pisa). The goal of the workshop is to build bridges between work on physiognomy and ekphrasis in Graeco-Roman and the Semitic languages, and the physiognomic omens, therapeutic descriptions, and rhetorical ‘types’ found in the cuneiform traditions of Mesopotamia.

Der Workshop reflektiert den Figura-Begriff aus drei verschiedenen historischen und sach-lichen Perspektiven: Ausgehend von Auerbachs Konzept eines ‚energischen Realismus' sollen erstens etymologische Aspekte von figura, zweitens konzeptionelle Affinitäten und Abgrenzungen zu anderen Darstellungsmodi (Mimesis, Ekphrasis und Allegorie) und drittens der Figura-Begriff in Melanchthons Rhetorik besprochen werden. Der Diskussionscharakter soll hier im Vordergrund stehen. Kurze Impulsreferate aus Philosophie, Religionswissenschaft und Germanistik sollen in die Diskussion einführen und das Gespräch einleiten.

Seit Gilbert Ryles Unterscheidung zwischen knowing that und knowing how, die in der These mündete, dass jedem Wissen ein Können vorausgeht, untersucht die Wissensforschung die Bezüge zwischen
propositionalem „Wissen, dass“ und nichtpropositionalem „Wissen, wie“. Diese sind oft wechselseitig. Wissensbestände mit normativpräskriptiver
Funktion (wie z.B. Gesetze und Konventionen) bedürfen, um erfolgreich
umgesetzt zu werden, einer praxisimmanenten Fähigkeit, Regeln zu befolgen (wie z.B. beim Sprechen, Denken und Handeln). Andererseits
beruht jede praktische Fähigkeit auf einer Einübung von Wahrnehmungs- und Handlungsmustern, die mit vorbegrifflichen, vortheoretischen und vorpropositionalen Erkenntnisprozessen einhergeht.
Vor diesem theoretischen Hintergrund wird der geplante Workshop antike Texte von Herodot, Platon, Xenophon, Aristoteles, Oreibasios und
Simplikios nach Transferprozessen zwischen propositionalen und nicht-propositionalen Wissensformen befragen. Dabei soll das Augenmerk auf antike Auffassungen von Theorie, Übung und Praxis gerichtet sein, die
ineinanderwirken und sich wechselseitig bedingen. Desiderat ist es, den bei diesen Wechselbezügen wirksamen Wissenswandel in den Blick zu nehmen und in seinen vielfältigen Ausprägungen zu untersuchen.

There are two dominant understandings of Pythagoras in the Pythagorean tradition and research about it: Pythagoras as a “shaman” and “religious leader” on the one hand, as a “philosopher” and “scientific genius” on the other. Various attempts have been made to reconcile these understandings as well as to analyze them separately. Most recently, scholarship has tended to compartmentalize different facets of Pythagorean knowledge and in doing so has failed to provide a context in which to explore questions of their origins, development, and interdependency.
This conference aims to reverse the trend by addressing the connections between the different forms (practical, technical, procedural, propositional, conscious, tacit knowledge, etc.) and fields within the body of Pythagorean knowledge (including eschatology, metempsychosis, metaphysics, epistemology, arithmology, medicine, music, and politics). In particular, we intend to discuss how askesis, i.e. practical training and/or exercise concerning the Pythagorean way of life, was related to, and influenced, more doctrinal fields of knowledge such as Pythagorean religion and science.
The papers are expected to explore the effects of such interdependences of knowledge both within the Pythagorean corpus and on its later reception. They will analyze the impact of various aspects of Pythagorean knowledge on each other and how the Pythagorean tradition was changed over time. Accordingly, the conference will cover different historical periods, from the Archaic Period (6th century BC) to Neoplatonism, Early Christianity, European and Arabic Middle Ages, Renaissance through Early Modernity (17th century AD).

"Non solo Platone!". Attorno a Platone vi furono gli altri socratici, con i loro dialoghi e le loro dispute. Tutti insieme formarono un circuito culturale così vivace da occupare il campo della filosofia, fino ad affermarsi e far ombra ad ogni altro filone, dai sofisti agli anassagorei, dagli eleatici ai democritei, che non a caso ebbero crescenti difficoltà a sostenere il confronto con loro.
Di qui l’esigenza di allargare il quadro e guardare all'insieme dei socratici e della loro vastissima produzione letteraria, resistendo alla tentazione di
trattare i compagni di strada di Platone come fratelli minori e figure umbratili per definizione.
La riflessione su questi temi ha preso il via nel 2003 ad Aix-en-Provence, per poi trovare ampio sviluppo a Senigallia (2005) e Palermo (2006). Sulla stessa linea di ricerca si pone il presente convegno.

The course investigates the relationship between music and literature from both an historical and a thematic viewpoint. I shall examine the interaction between sound and word within a wide chronological frame, spanning from ancient Greece to present. I will focus in particular on the connection between divine inspiration, madness and frenzy: these topics will be investigated throughout the epochs, with the aim of identifying lines of continuity between musical and literary themes. Several sample cases will be examined thanks to the testimonies of musicians and musicologists: this will provide the students with a direct knowledge of the issues at the core of the relationship between music and literature. Teaching materials will include: film and audio clips, and handouts of literary, philosophical, and scholarly texts.

Wissen spielt in der griechischen Ethik eine prominente Rolle. Sowohl in religiösen als auch in philosophischen Texten der griechischen Antike wird die Auffassung einer „Wissensethik“ vertreten, die bis in den Hellenismus hinein mit verschiedenen Akzentuierungen diskutiert wird. So findet man bei Homer Stellen, in denen Helden um Tugenden und Fähigkeiten wissen, in der Tragödie Beschreibungen einer unermesslichen, zumeist frevelhaften Durst nach Wissen, in der vorsokratischen Philosophie die Hervorhebung einer göttlichen, auf „Wahrheit“ ausgerichteten Erkenntnis, bei Platon und anderen Sokratikern die Auseinandersetzung mit einem „philosophischen Intellektualismus“ wonach ethisches Fehlverhalten unmöglich ist, bei Aristoteles die scharfe Trennung zwischen ethischem und epistemischen Wissen und die damit zusammenhängende Dichotomisierung von ethischen und dianoetischen Tugenden. Ziel des Seminars ist die vergleichende Untersuchung dieser Auffassungen sowie ihrer Ursprünge und Wandlungsprozesse. Zu diesem Zweck werden verschiedene Texte dieser Autoren in die Betrachtung gezogen und im Hinblick auf religionswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen analytisch erläutert.

In der griechisch-römischen Antike ist das Bedeutungsspektrum der Askese von einer Breite, die sich kaum überblicken läßt. Die Begriffe, mit denen in klassischer und hellenistischer Zeit das körpergebundene, „asketische“ Übungswissen umschrieben wird, zeugen von einer Vielfalt von Nuancen und Schattierungen, die auf einen komplexen Hintergrund hinweist. Dieser schlägt sich nieder in einer Reihe von inhaltlich eng miteinander verwandten Substantiva, die in der philosophischen Literatur der Antike eine zentrale Rolle einnehmen: sophrosyne (Besonnenheit), enkrateia (Enthaltsamkeit), karteria (Standhaftigkeit), autarkeia (Selbstgenügsamkeit), ischys (Stärke), askesis (Übung), ponos (Mühe) und euteleia (Frugalität). Mit diesen Termini werden unterschiedliche Formen eines Übungswissens angesprochen, das intellektualistische sowie nicht-intellektualistische Momente beinhaltet und aufgrund seiner inhaltlichen Spannweite extrem artikuliert ist. Ziel dieses Seminars ist die vergleichende Untersuchung dieser Auffassungen – sowie ihrer Ursprünge und Wandlungsprozesse – bei den namhaftesten Schülern des Sokrates, Aristoteles, den Stoikern und den Neuplatonikern. Zu diesem Zweck werden verschiedene Texte dieser Autoren in die Betrachtung einbezogen und im Hinblick auf religionswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen analytisch erläutert.

Attraverso la lettura del più antico testo di storia della filosofia, il libro A della Metafisica di Aristotele, il corso si propone di fornire gli strumenti essenziali ad un primo avvicinamento alla disciplina. Verranno altresì ricostruiti i momenti fondamentali della speculazione filosofica successiva ad Aristotele, con particolare attenzione agli autori e alle correnti di pensiero maggiormente recepiti nel mondo antico.

Il corso si propone di esaminare la figura di Eros alla luce del suo rapporto con il sapere filosofico. Testo di riferimento sarà il Simposio di Platone, a partire dal quale verranno analizzate le molteplici “vie” di Eros: il suo nesso con Afrodite e le altre divinità del pantheon greco, la sua sublimazione nella virtù dell’anima, il suo ruolo nell’ascesa filosofica della scala amoris.

Attraverso la lettura di importanti testi del classicismo tedesco, e ricorrendo a ulteriore materiale fornito dal docente nelle dispense, il corso si propone di compiere una riflessione puntuale sulla ricezione moderna dell’antico. Particolare importanza verrà attribuita al nesso imitazione-verità, con riferimenti mirati alle questioni dell’esemplarismo e dell’ontologia dell’immagine teorizzate da Jean-Jacques Wunenburger.

Il corso si propone di esaminare una delle questioni più dibattute nell’estetica occidentale, vale a dire l’origine del rapporto mimesi-verità nel mondo antico. Particolare attenzione verrà dedicata a Platone e Aristotele, in special modo alla Repubblica e alla Poetica quali momenti fondamentali per intendere le molteplici sfaccettature della mimesis. Attraverso la lettura di brani forniti nelle dispense verrà altresì affrontato il problema della rappresentazione artistica nel mondo greco.

Il corso si propone di affrontare il rapporto tra l’anima e il divino nel mondo greco a partire dalla concezione di psyche in Omero e nella poesia epica, soffermandosi sul significato religioso di tale nozione nell’orfismo e nei presocratici, fino a prendere in esame la “cura dell’anima” socratica e la relativa “etica della conoscenza”. Particolare attenzione verrà prestata alle implicazioni estetiche di tali nozioni.

A puzzling feature of the 4th diaeresis of Plato’s Sophist is its conclusion. After having defined the sophist by means of a “purification,” i.e., by screening out the better from the worse in a series of five diaereseis, the Eleatic Stranger concludes that the sophist has the ability to “refute the empty belief in one’s own wisdom,” an ability which is “nothing other than a noble art of sophistry” (231b6-8). Some scholars agree in identifying such “sophistry” with the Socratic elenchus (see esp. Cornford 1935, 177-179). In fact, refuting someone “when (s)he thinks (s)he is saying something though (s)he is saying nothing” until (s)he feels ashamed for the opinions (s)he previously held (230c-d), is a kind of purification that strongly reminds of Socrates’s elenctic activity. According to Plato and other first-generation Socratics, the shame triggered by Socrates plays a pivotal role in reversing the unfounded pretense of knowledge of Socrates’s interlocutors into an admission of ignorance (e.g. Plat. Symp. 216a-c, 217e-218a; Xenoph. Mem. 4.2.39-40; Aesch. Alc. SSR VI A 51-54). As Rosen has aptly pointed out, the 4th diaeresis ends with a definition not of the sophist, but of “a hybrid of the sophist and the philosopher” (1983, 131). This is surprising, as one explicit aim Plato pursues very often (in the Sophist as well as in many other dialogues) is to distinguish, in most cases even to counterpose, the sophist from the philosopher. This begs the question of what kind of sophistry Plato has in mind at 226B-231B.
My aim is to show that in the 4th diaeresis Plato points at a definition of the sophist that merges both the professional sophists and Socrates—a definition that can be traced back to Old Comedy. Here, the word sophistes encompasses “intellectuals” of various kinds (sophists, philosophers, phusiologoi, and even the initiates to mystery cults such as Orphism or the Eleusinian Mysteries) that were lampooned not only in Aristophanes’s Clouds (331, 360, 1111), but also in other comedies by playwrights who were active in the decade before 423 a.C. (such as Eupolis, Ameipsias, and Plato Comicus; see Bromberg 2018 for a thorough survey of the evidence). Moreover, Aristophanes’s Socrates seems to be aware of the diairetic method when he orders Strepsiades to “let your thinking become subtle and consider your affairs bit by bit, properly dividing them up and examining them” (orthos diairon kai skopon, 739-741).
It seems likely that Plato derives his diairetic method from Aristophanes. This applies especially to the 4th diaeresis, which clearly hints at a comic context: at 227b, the Eleatic Stranger expounds the method of diairesis: “the method… tries to understand how all kinds of expertise belong to the same kind or not. And so for that it values them all equally without thinking that some of them are more ridiculous than others, as far as their similarity is concerned. And it doesn’t consider a person haughtier because (s)he exemplifies hunting by military expertise rather than by killing vermin”. Here Plato subordinates several items that are typical of comedy to the logic of diairesis: 1) things should be valued per se, without reference to their comic value (their geloion); 2) the diairesis should not consider whether a person is “haughty” (semnos), a quality distinctive of Socrates (and other comic sophistai); 3) according to Plato, his very haughtiness derives from a very peculiar expertise: that of “killing vermin” (phtheiristike). Such expertise is precisely what the protagonist of Clouds, the old and dumb Strepsiades, lacks. For about ninety verses (634-725) Strepsiades is plagued by bugs (and thus unable to properly follow Socrates’s teachings) because he is unable to get rid of them. Socrates and his pupils, on the contrary, are so familiar with insects, and in particular with fleas, that they are able not only to tame them, but also to measure the distance of their jumps and even to craft waxen shoes for them (144-153). It is likely that the bugs and the fleas that infest the phrontisterion in Clouds point at the poor personal hygiene of Socrates and his pupils (compare Aristophanes Clouds 837 with Birds 1282 and 1554-1555).
Poor personal hygiene seems to be also implied at 227a, where the Eleatic Stranger deals with the “purification” of bodies: “fulling and all kinds of furbishing take care of the purification of nonliving bodies, but they have lots of specialized and ridiculous-seeming names.” Plato seems to imply that the purification of the body is ridiculous (“the katharsis of the insignificant outside part is done by bathing”). Therefore, katharsis should be applied to the soul (227d). Again, the context of the Clouds is evident. If on the one hand the Socratics do not care about their personal hygiene, the sophistic education of the weak argument recommends warm baths, where youths should exercise their eristic abilities (1052-1054). Plato’s account about “techniques of bathing” seems to refer to these verses of Clouds. A proper katharsis must purify the soul, not the body. And it must purify it through elenchus, i.e., by refuting all “the inflated and rigid beliefs one has about oneself” (230c).
In my paper, I deal with these connections, showing how Plato’s account of sophistry at 226B-231B depends on a close reading of comic topoi.

The famous passage on “Socratic midwifery” at Theaet. 149a-151 has long puzzled scholars. The vast majority of scholars attributes midwifery to the historical Socrates (Taylor 1911, Burnet 1916, Cornford 1935, Humbert 1967, Guthrie 1971, Tarrant 1988, Cianci 2018), while others think that the passage at Theaet. 149a-151 should be taken as reflecting a development of Plato’s mature thought, given its (implicit and/or explicit) implications with the theory of recollection outlined in the Meno (Burnyeat 1977, Vlastos 1994, Sedley 2004). It is a well-known fact that “Socratic midwifery” plays a key role in Theaetetus (see not only 149a-151e, but also 157c-d, 160e-161b, 161e, 184b, 210b), but seems to be absent from the rest of the Platonic corpus. The metaphor of pregnancy occurs in another famous passage of Plato, Symp. 206d-207a. But Socrates plays here no specific role as a midwife; and birth is conceived as “immortal” and “in beauty”. The sole fact that Diotima imparts this view to Socrates makes it likely that here Plato is putting forward his own idea of education, in a deliberate attempt to sift it from Socrates’ practice of elenchus. In my paper, I claim that such an attempt can be also found in the passage Theaet. 149a-151d, and that, consequently, “Socratic Midwifery” should be understood as a concept Plato devises to distance himself from both Socrates and the Socratics of his own generation.
It is important to note that the abovementioned passages of Theaetetus are the sole occurrences of “Socratic midwifery” not only in Plato’s work; we find this image in no other passage of Socratic literature. Some scholars have pointed at two verses of Aristophanes’ Clouds (135-137) in which a “miscarriage” of ideas is parodied. The verb implied by Aristophanes (exambloo) is the same occurring at Theaet. 150e4, a coincidence suggesting that the “historical Socrates” indeed practiced midwifery (see e.g. Tarrant 1988 and Cianci 2018). I think that this is too hasty an inference. The verses 135-137 have no direct reference to Socrates: the miscarriage is not Socrates’, but that of his pupils.
The two verses seem to be related to other passages of Aristophanes, where he uses the metaphor of implanting his own ideas in another’s womb (at both Clouds 529-533 and Wasps 1043-1045). Aristophanes wants to highlight that “other women” carried out the pregnancy of his own “children”, hinting here at the fact that before his official debut with Knights (staged in 424) he had written two plays without producing them (Banqueters, in 427, and Babylonians, in 426). It is interesting to note that Aristophanes explicitly equates himself to a woman who helps other women generate offspring – like in Theaetetus Plato equates Socrates to a midwife and Socrates’ pupils to pregnant women. The major difference is that Aristophanes uses this image to describe himself as an extraordinarily fertile playwright; whereas Plato depicts Socrates as a midwife in order to show that he is “barren” and “too old to have children himself”.
Another important issue tackled at Theaet. 149a-151d is that of “matchmaking” (proagogeia): Socrates is an excellent midwife not only because he can tell better than anyone else whether women are pregnant or not, but also because he knows which kind of couples produce the best children (149d-150a). This applies especially to young men who seek paideia: the midwife Socrates knows which teachers are best suited to educate them (151d). Also in this case, it seems evident that Plato draws from an existing motif, that of “matchmaking” (proagogeia or mastropeia). Socrates has not let this ability be known and does not want Theaetetus to make a public accusation of it (149a).
Matchmaking is attributed to the Pericles’ mistress Aspasia by another Socratic, Aeschines of Sphettus.  In a dialogue named after the famous hetaera, Aeschines had portrayed Aspasia while instructing Xenophon and his wife about how to become excellent in marriage (SSR IV A 59-72). Aspasia’s art of matchmaking plays a crucial role also in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where Socrates claims that he had learned matchmaking from Aspasia (2.6.36-9). In a section of Symposium, Xenophon attributes matchmaking both to Socrates and Antisthenes (4.59-64).
It is very likely that Aeschines’s Aspasia, as well the two passages from Xenophon, are earlier than Plato’s Theaetetus (written around 369). My working hypothesis is that in Theaet. 149a-151, Plato reshapes the motif of the “matchmaking Socrates” he knows from other Socratics by merging it with the midwife-motif he draws from Aristophanes. The resulting image of “Socratic midwifery” is therefore a fictional conglomeration. Plato uses it to dwell on his own creativity as a philosophical writer, but also to show that Socrates is nothing but “a barren old woman… unable to generate offspring”.

Socrates’s relationship with the divine is threefold: (1) he owes his ‘elenctic mission’ – i.e., his questioning, examining, and refuting other people in order to make them aware of their ignorance –to a god, Apollo, from whom he derives a human wisdom (anthropine sophia) which is juxtaposed to the absolute wisdom of the gods (theia sophia); (2) he believes that human beings are the products of an intelligent design conceived by craftperson-gods. These gods take care of humans and, inversely, all good deeds of humans are a service to the gods; (3) he has a privileged relationship with a divine entity within him, thanks to which he is able to ‘make others better’, that is, to perform his ‘elenctic mission’.

Scholarship has so far largely neglected the links between 1, 2 and 3, focusing instead on particular aspects of Socrates’s religiosity. In my talk, I examine the connections between Socrates’s privileged relationship with the gods, providence, and ‘the divine within him’ as reported by Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines. The evidence suggests that Socrates was endowed with a divine gift that was closely related to his personal happiness as well as with his ability to make others better (i.e., from the Socratic perspective, happier).

Marcel Duchamp learned painting and chess from his elder brothers, at the age of thirteen. He never ceased to be an artist and a chess player, although he had an ambivalent relationship to both art and chess. In this paper I discuss evidence (pictures, statements, and chess games of Duchamp) from which it is possible to infer that Duchamp remained faithful to both art and chess throughout his life, and that the way Duchamp used to play chess profoundly influenced him as an artist (and vice versa). In fact, Duchamp had a similar approach to both art and chess: he understood art like a chess game (i.e. as a matter not of “retinal” appeal, but of pure intellect), and chess like an art (i.e. as a game aimed at achieving not victory over the opponent, but cerebral beauty).