The significance of Plato's literary style to the content of his ideas is one of the central problems in the study of Plato. This volume presents some of the most recent scholarship from around the world on the wide range of issues related to Plato's dialogue form. The essays addresses general questions concerning Plato's literary style, the relation of his style to other genres and traditions in Ancient Greece, and Plato's characters and his purpose in using them.
The purpose of the conference “On Pythagoreanism”, held in Brasilia in 2011, was to bring together leading scholars from all over the world to define the status quaestionis for the ever-increasing interest and research on Pythagoreanism in the 21st century. The papers included in this volume exemplify the variety of topics and approaches now being used to understand the polyhedral image of one of the most fascinating and long-lasting intellectual phenomena in Western history. Cornelli’s paper opens the volume by charting the course of Pythagorean studies over the past two centuries. The remaining contributions range chronologically from Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans of the archaic period (6th-5th centuries BCE) through the classical, hellenistic and late antique periods, to the eighteenth century. Thematically they treat the connections of Pythagoreanism with Orphism and religion, with mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology and with politics and the Pythagorean way of life.
The history of Pythagoreanism is littered with different and incompatible interpretations, to the point that Kahn (1974) suggested that, instead of another thesis on Pythagoreanism, it would be preferable to assess traditions with the aim of producing a good historiographical presentation. This almost fourty-year-old observation by Kahn, directs the author of this book towards a fundamentally historiographical rather than philological brand of work, that is, one neither exclusively devoted to the exegesis of sources such as Philolaus, Archytas or even of one of the Hellenistic Lives nor even to the theoretical approach of one of the themes that received specific contributions from Pythagoreanism, such as mathematics, cosmology, politics or theories of the soul. Instead, this monograph sets out to reconstruct the way in which the tradition established Pythagoreanism’s image, facing one of the central problems that characterizes Pythagoreanism more than other ancient philosophical movements: the drastically shifting terrain of the criticism of the sources. The goal of this historiographical approach is to embrace Pythagoreanism in its entirety, through - and not in spite of - its complex articulation across more than a millennium.
Plato's political philosophy is one of the most controversial facets of ancient thought. Because of its wide influence on the political thought of the last century, most of Plato's ideas are still under debate and he is seen either as the origin of totalitarian movements or as the predecessor of the current rule of law and the father of western democracy. If the evaluation of Plato's different political proposals has been the object of contradictory interpretations, his own appreciation of the existing political systems creates a matter of many historical debates, too. This volume treats different aspects of Plato's conflicting relationship to the city-state. It presents original approaches to Plato's reflections on the city and his problems.
