The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The ʼCorpus dei Papiri Filosofici‛ takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the canonic (...) scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus. (shrink)
In Folder n. 7, Container 49 of the Vlastos-Nachlass, an as-yet unpublished series of notes by Gregory Vlastos on Alcmaeon and his empirical method are preserved across two fascicles. After briefly contextualizing Vlastos' remarks within the history of scholarship on Alcmaeon, this paper provides the first annotated reconstruction of the manuscript's extant portion.
The Heraclitean tradition in the Herculaneum papyri is a topic which involves some of the most important research fields of ancient philosophy: ethics, physics and cosmology, theology and aesthetics. This paper concentrates on Heraclitus’ fr. 18 Marcovich, where the pre-Socratic philosopher talks about an unspecified κοπίδων ἀρχηγόϲ. The fragment occurs in the seventh book of Philodemus’ Rhetoric and is the only direct quotation of Heraclitus in this multi-volume treatise. This article presents a new textual reconstruction of the two columns of (...) the papyrus in which the same passage is quoted and attempts: 1. to contextualize the quotation inside the Philodemean paraphrase of a treatise by the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon against the rhetoricians of his time; 2. to reconsider the grammatical and philosophical problem of the subject of the Heraclitean quotation. Almost all scholars have considered Pythagoras to be the target of Heraclitus. But certain elements allow us to go beyond this old opinion and to understand this fragment as something of more than a personal dispute. Rhetoric, according to its supporters, was an ‘art’ since Homer’s times and gained its professional autonomy with Corax and Tisias. There is no reason to believe that, in quoting Heraclitus, Diogenes has totally changed the subject of the fragment he cites. That subject could originally have been very similar to that attested in the Philodemean paraphrase, that is the education of the rhetoricians. (shrink)
Since the editio princeps, PSI XI 1215 has been recognized as a fragment of a Socratic dialogue. After the first studies on its philological aspects and probable authorship, however, the text has not drawn the attention of historians of ancient philosophy, and this important Socratic evidence has long been totally neglected. This paper reviews the history of scholarship on the Florentine fragment and presents a new critical edition, on the basis of which it tries to give for the first time (...) a historico-philosophical reading of the text. This interpretation aims to demonstrate: a) that the Socratic philosopher who is writing had not a low cultural level, and the fragment presupposes an accurate knowledge of Plato’s political thought, as Medea Norsa and Girolamo Vitelli already supposed with regard to Book 8 of Plato’s Republic; b) that the fragment in question can be attributed to a Socratic dialogue which was most likely composed in the first half of the 4th century BC; c) that both philosophical and textual arguments support the attribution of the fragment to a dialogue of Antisthenes. (shrink)
El primer capítulo del tratado Sobre lo bello inteligible (Enn. V, 8 <31>) proporciona un importante punto de partida para analizar las relaciones entre las estéticas plotiniana y platónica. Plotino plantea algunas objeciones contra el concepto tradicional de mimēsis que parecen contradecir las teorías de Platón en Resp. X. Tras una relectura de pasajes básicos de los diálogos platónicos (de República a Sofista), el ensayo regresa a las Enéadas y trata de entender las razones del «giro» plotiniano. Palabras clave: Creación; (...) Mímesis; Estética; Platón; PlotinoThe first chapter of the treatise On the intelligible Beautiful (Enn. V, 8 <31>) provides an important starting point to analyse the relations between the Plotinian and Platonic aesthetics. Against the traditional concept of mimēsis, Plotinus raises some objections that seem to contradict the theories of Plato in Resp. X. After a rereading of basic passages of the Platonic dialogues (from Republic to Sophist), the essay comes back to the Enneads and tries to understand the reasons of the Plotinian «turn». Keywords: Creation; Mimesis; Aesthetics; Plato; Plotinus. (shrink)
