In the fourth book of the Republic (424c4-6) Plato posits a relationship – as tight as it is obscure – between innovation in music and the changing of laws. Although the passage is often quoted as evidence of Plato’s misoneism in the musical field, its meaning and its role in the context to which it belongs have not yet been discussed in full. The article presents a detailed analysis of the passage, within the framework of Plato’s treatment of education in Resp. 2-3, its relation to legislation and his view of political change in the dialogue. It is argued that the notion of guarding, an essential concept in the political and social project of Kallipolis, is key to getting to the core of the link between music and law set out at Resp. 424c4-6.

Plato’s Republic, Music, Politics, Law, Change.

According to the usual reading, the Laws represent a substantial change in Plato’s thought. As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that Plato changed his mind about the aim of politics, namely, virtue, but I contend that there is some change of perspective about both human nature and the acquisition of virtue in the social context. Since Plato adopts a more reality-oriented perspective as compared to the Republic, then it is clear why he mainly focuses on the virtue of sophrosyne; there exist indeed different forms of moderation, which are accessible to all citizens. More specifically, I do argue that the historical analysis provided by Plato in Laws III rests on the praise of sophrosyne, meaning that Laws III itself does not contradict the dialectical analysis of Laws I-II.

Plato, Laws, Sophrosyne, Virtue, Republic.

The Theory of Corporeal, Intelligible, and Psychological Minima and the Eternity of Human Souls in Xenocrates. The aim of this paper is to investigate Xenocrates’ theory of minima. Plato’s disciple and future leader of the Academy postulated the existence of ultimate and indissoluble parts of the sensible world, which can be identified either with elementary triangles (a theory derived from Plato’s Timaeus) or indivisible lines. Since these parts represent the limit beyond which the sensible world cannot be broken down, they are eternal and grant eternity to the sensible world itself. Similarly, the intelligible world can be divided into minima, i.e., single ideas, which are simple, indivisible, and eternal. The paper will try to show that this conception can be extended also to the psychic level: in other words, the rational and irrational parts of the soul constitute psychological minima; since they are minima, they are eternal. In this way, Xenocrates’ peculiar theory of the immortality of the whole soul – of both its rational and irrational parts – can be conveniently justified. Finally, the paper will try to examine a possible ethical corollary of this theory: for Xenocrates, humans must take care of their rational and irrational dimensions and thus of their bodies because rationality and irrationality are structural parts of the soul, and so they cannot be eliminated.

Xenocrates, Physics, Ideas, Psychology, Ethics, Minima.

In this paper I deal with chapters 1-15 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Δ (V). The main aim is to provide a map of their argument. Despite each chapter seems to be devoted only to the analysis of the meanings of a single philosophical term, I shall demonstrate how their ordering is far from being accidental. Each chapter is indeed thematized by its previous one/s and meant to deny relations of convertibility between concepts.

Keywords: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Terms, Concepts, Convertibility.

The semantic field of punishment (e.g., poena, supplicium, castigatio, ultio) is widely attested in Seneca’s philosophical works. He was deeply interested in such matters, from both a moral and a political point of view. This article investigates in particular two texts: De ira, where punishment is explored in its psychological, anthropological, and ethical dimensions related to the genesis of anger, and De clementia, which deals with punishment as a prerogative of the imperial power. Seneca’s statements about punishment (the call for mildness, rationality, and restraint in punishment policy, the critique of retributivism, and the emphasis on the goal of reforming the offender) mark a fundamental step in the history of philosophical and legal thought.

Seneca, Punishment, Anger, Revenge, Mercy.

According to Suárez a law can obligate quoad sufficientiam even those who are unaware of its existence. Consequently, the obligation that constitutes the necessary effect of the law cannot consist in the psychological condition in which the subject is put by the legislator’s command. In this paper I hypothesize that a theory of obligation could emerge from the pages of De Legibus that is consistent with the conclusions Suárez arrives at regarding the question of promulgation and ignorance of the law. A reconstruction of the Suarezian theory of obligation that takes into account such conclusions could allow us to understand why, according to Suárez, all laws, even moral laws, are to all effects penal laws in the broad sense. A reconstruction of this kind could also allow us to perhaps understand what exactly is the obligation added by the legislator to the natural duty to do or not to do the act that he prescribes or prohibits.

Suárez, Penal Law, Culpability, Ignorantia Legis, Obligation.

The essay aims to investigate some introductory passages of The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. The fundamental aim is to interrogate Sade’s novel in the light of the tradition of “negative thought” and the radical criticism that has characterised it. The fundamental hypothesis that we intend to corroborate coincides with the strict relationship between the novel and the debate on the nature of sovereign power, considered, by the Marquis of Sade, in its merely repressive manifestations. We purpose to question the sense of a significant conceptual inversion that brings Sade’s theory closer to the more recent theoretical diagnoses formulated by Walter Benjamin, in a clear opposition to all theories of sovereign power conceived within the modern philosophical tradition.

Violence, Modernity, Metaphysics, Sovereignty, Critical Theory.

G.W.F. Hegel left no essay explicitly or exclusively dedicated to translation. Nevertheless, Hegel is one of the great theorists of the activity of translation: he made extensive use of the problems, semantic constellation and dynamics of Übersetzung to resolve certain fundamental questions of his philosophical system, including the decentralised status of the subject and the relation of conceptual thought to representation. Starting from these premises, the essay analyses the concept of translation in Hegel, focusing in particular on a few systematic works: the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) and the Outlines of Philosophy of Right (1821), in which the concept of translation is employed to understand the dialectical status of the subject, and the Berlin editions of Encyclopaedia (1827 and 1830), in which translation becomes the most general explanatory model concerning the meaning of philosophy.

Traslation, Spirit, Subject, Thought, Philosophy.

This article aims at offering a definition of the concept of nihilism in Leopardi’s works based on what can be considered the theme unfolded in 1821 and which we can find in Zibaldone’s notes. Firstly, a brief reconstruction of the meaning of Leopardi’s nihilism in the italian History of Philosophy is provided and, secondly, it is shown how the meaning given to the word “nothing” by Leopardi depends on the empiricist epistemology assumed as the only possible way of knowing. Specifically, we take into account several interpretations which, implicitly or explicitly, attempt to find out the role played by the concept of nothing in Leopardi’s thought. After the analysis of these authors’ standpoints, it will be clear how a coherent and accurate definition of a sharp nihilism is possible only after the consideration of the consequences entailed in Plato’s epistemology dereliction shown in Leopardi’s words.

Nihilism, Plato’s Ideas, Empiricism, Epistemology, Nothing.

This paper focuses on the role that some concepts of Freud’s theory played within certain critical works by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. In particular, on the one hand, an attempt will be made to show whether and to what extent some concepts of Freud’s theory contributed to the psychological model of subjectivity contained in Walter Benjamin’s 1938 text On some motifs in Baudelaire; on the other hand, with respect to Theodor W. Adorno, an attempt will be made to highlight the Freudian features of Adorno’s idea of subjectivity in one of his 1938 works entitled On the fetish character in Music and the regression of listening.

Adorno, Critical Theory, Experience, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin.

The paper deals the recent philosophical-anthropological debate on the “Anthropocene event” in relation to certain positions of the philosophy of the tragic, particularly those developed within German idealism. The concept of the tragic is used here in an attempt to clarify the critical relationship that links the present in which we are immersed, inevitably derived from the conceptions developed by the Enlightenment, with the urgency of the current climate crisis. This reflection allows for a possible new meaning and a new direction for critical philosophy and also for ecological thought, starting precisely from the challenge that the concept of the tragic poses to us today: the ontological problem of coexistence.

Tragic, Anthropocene, Coexistence, Enlightenment, Critique.

The critique of totalitarianism was a constant thread in the work of Claude Lefort (1924-2010). The article distinguishes between two periods, the first building from a critical Marxism as well as Lefort’s experience as a political militant; the second, influenced by the later work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, his teacher whose posthumous work he edited, rethinks the concept of totalitarianism particularly in terms of the role of the symbolic. The result of the second period shows how democracy is itself the radical implications of the critique of totalitarianism. Perhaps more important, during the interlude between the two periods, Lefort’s monumental Machiavel le travail de l’oeuvre had highlighted the concept of “the political” whose relation to the emergence of modern democracy the essay suggests.

Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, Critique of Totalitarianism, Democracy, Political Theory.

Starting from a letter of Erich Auerbach to Walter Benjamin, in which a sharp criticism of promethean modernization and of a form of dispotic revolution is developped, a parallel is attempted with the concept of Stiftung or “institution” which was at the center of Maurice Merleau-Ponty research on history in the last years of his life. Both Auerbach and Merleau-Ponty appear to defend an idea of progress and revolution in which novelty and repetition, the arrow and the circle are solidary and copresent; both appear to defend the possibility to create novelty and to exceed tradition in all fields. Some hints are made to the singular use, by Merleau-Ponty, of the trotskyist concept of “permanent revolution”.

Revolution, Auerbach, Merleau-Ponty, History, Trotskij.

This article consists of four sections. In the first a preliminary picture of Castoriadis’ philosophy is offered with special reference to its political relevance and implications. The thesis defended is that Castoriadis’ research is one of the most intelligent, innovative and challenging form of a modern anarchist political philosophy. In the second section a few shortcomings in such philosophy and research are singled out. They could be cursorily summarized as a specific radical attention to ontology and in the downplaying of the normative dimension of social reality and human action. Ethics is programmatically neglected by Castoriadis, in spite of the strong moral reason motivating his research. In the two additional sections of the article the special ontology proposed by Castoriadis is presented and discussed by pondering pros and cons of such an ambitious philosophical construction. Anarchy as a regime of freedom is here considered the only possible political form to get emancipation from hierarchy and social closure, and it is rooted in a form of being, more than a form of life, that is perpetually opening to the emergency of radical novelty, a novelty that is self-founded and self-justified by the ontological openness itself. The result of such strategy is society as a web of norms without foundation beyond an existential gesture on the one hand, but nonetheless supported through a foundation and justification that does not need any norm. The being and its double, society, are anarchic in its core, and in this way they, so to say, are a fact of autarchic, decision, not the product of justified deliberation. A well ordered society will, to sum up, be one that is able to proceed as a movement without definitively justified norms, and nonetheless through norms.

Castoriadis, Anarchism, Anarchy, Ontology, Political Philosophy.