zooming in on Philosophical Debates

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2018

Recent studies broadly agree in recognising the Academy as the context where most of the spurious dialogues transmitted in the corpus Platonicum were produced. However, scholars have to cope with the heritage of decades of studies devoted to isolating non-Platonic elements in these works, most notably influences from other Hellenistic schools. Attempts to solve this problem have followed two approaches. The first is to minimise the significance of these purported influences, in an effort to fit everything into a Socratic-Platonic background; another approach consists in interpreting these allusions as signs of philosophical polemics, to be read as evidence of the Academy’s engagement in the contemporary debate. In this paper, I intend to address the issue through the analysis of select passages from three dialogues (Second Alcibiades, Eryxias and Axiochus) in which scholars have identified traces of Stoic and Epicurean doctrines. I argue that most, if not all, of these references are effectively to be interpreted as a polemic against rival schools, and that their elusive appearance is conditioned by the literary genre of the Socratic dialogue.

LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015

This work looks at the main themes, concepts and lead figures of the Hellenic philosophical tradition that not only influenced the Greek and then Latin world in antiquity, but also had a lasting influence on intellectual and theological development in the West right up until the Age of Enlightenment. To this end, the focus is on the Socratic tradition, through Plato and then Aristotle, and then the Stoic tradition whose strong imprint can be found on early Christianity, representing the core seed of Western theological evolution via Judaism, Christianity and then Islam.

The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 6 (2012) 201-212, 2012

Review of Lloyd P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity vols. 1-2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010),

Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, 2007

This essay analyzes the archaic Greek philosophers in their cultural and historical context. What is a "philosopher" in this period? What kinds of "philosophy" did these thinkers practice?

Strategies of Polemics in Greek and Roman Philosophy, 2016

The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece , 2018

How can we face today the problem of the beginnings of philosophy, avoiding the rationalistic opposition between mythos and logos and exploring instead the multiple styles of thought (hence the plural: beginnings) which emerged on the confine between mythology and the dawning reason? Maria Michela Sassi reconstructs the texture of archaic knowledge through its vanishing points, its accelerations in time, its cognitive techniques (starting from writing), the habit of intellectual competition. All these things made possible what we were used to call «the Greek miracle». Such definition, however, is misleading in its very conveying a charm that alters the features of what really happened in that far past between the Asian shores of Ionia and Magna Graecia. The beginning of the long process leading to the birth of philosophy was characterized by geographic polycentrism and disciplinary polygenesis: from Miletus to Elea, from Ephesus to Agrigento, some people started to reflect on the cosmic order, elaborated doctrines on the soul, wrote in the solemn Homeric metre or, later on, abandoned prosody in favour of an assertive prose, articulated like the laws of the polis. In order to define the category of the «Pre-Socratics», the prefix – however fortunate it has been – is not enough. The Milesian natural thinkers, the rhapsodist Xenophanes, the mathematician and “shaman” Pythagoras, the oracle-like Heraclitus, the inspired Parmenides, the “demonologist” Empedocles: all these thinkers share the same tension towards a reason which, by questioning traditionally recognized viewpoints, revolutionized the panorama of Greek knowledge.