Gabriele Cornelli

The following article aims to analyze some of the analogies with animals found in Plato's dialogue Phaedo. These analogies are present in almost all Platonic dialogues, always with a specific purpose. In Phaedo, the analogies with animals serve as arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul, the existence of ideas, and the possibility of remembering them. By using language as a tool for constructing metaphysics, Plato makes his analogies with animals as proportional terms suited to the attainable truth and the intelligibility of ideas in the world, as well as keys that open the doors to recollection within the soul.

A perda da capacidade de compreensão do tempo presente, marcada pela instrumentalização da razão, abandonando a dimensão metafísica, atinge a própria condição existencial humana, gerando uma anacronia. Diante disso, faz-se necessário apresentar e compreender as causas que levaram a essa condição, a partir da construção de uma fenomenologia da modernidade, através da leitura de Henrique Cláudio de Lima Vaz. A partir daí, será possível estabelecer um caminho que consiga explicar o contexto da sociedade atual, sua complexidade e a geração de seu enigma: a inexistência de um ethos. Inexistindo o ethos como referência fundante do ethos-hexis, a praxis perde seus referenciais, sendo orientada não pelo finalismo do logos – absoluto da razão –, mas pelas necessidades meramente objetificadas, marcadas pelo relativismo dos valores e por práticas egoístas. De maneira direta, essa alteração na realidade tempo-histórico-social-ética fará com que o humano acabe por perder sua liberdade e, consequentemente, sua identidade.

The doctrine of unity of opposites lays in the centre of the debate on Heraclitus’ philosophy. The present article proposes a critical analysis of the mainstream interpretation of geometrical oppositions (fragments DK 22 B 59, B 60 and B 103) as mere examples of different points of view. Instead, we suggest that these fragments are fundamental pieces in Heraclitus cosmology and that they are traces of a circular and archaic paradigm. Indeed, cyclical formulations are spread throughout the fragments and, read in connection with geometrical oppositions, perform a useful model to describe how permanence and change can be complementary events. In this context, circularity can be a key to the comprehension of unity of opposites as a result of interchangeable processes – as day and night, life and death, beginning and end – so that opposites are part of a concrete and vital unity.

The significance of Plato's literary style to the content of his ideas is perhaps one of the central problems in the study of Plato and Ancient Philosophy as a whole. As Samuel Scolnicov points out in this collection, many other philosophers have employed literary techniques to express their ideas, just as many literary authors have exemplified philosophical ideas in their narratives, but for no other philosopher does the mode of expression play such a vital role in their thought as it does for Plato. And yet, even after two thousand years there is still no consensus about why Plato expresses his ideas in this distinctive style. Selected from the first Latin American Area meeting of the International Plato Society (www.platosociety.org) in Brazil in 2012, the following collection of essays 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 can be divided into three categories. The first addresses general questions concerning Plato's literary style. The second concerns the relation of his style to other genres and traditions in Ancient Greece. And the third examines 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.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife, briefly appears on his final day, a moment rich in philosophical significance. This article examines her role through a doxographic analysis of ancient sources, exploring how gendered representations influence the reception of her character. While later traditions depict Xanthippe as irritable and disruptive, Platonic discourse offers a more complex portrayal, challenging conventional gender norms. Her presence at Socrates’ deathbed transcends the typical depiction of a mourning wife; her lamentation foreshadows the emotional responses of Socrates’ male companions, reflecting the complexity of human reactions to death. Additionally, her forced removal symbolises the exclusion of affective and corporeal elements from philosophical discourse. However, the emotional breakdown of Socrates’ followers challenges the idealised image of rational detachment. This study argues that Xanthippe’s role is not merely supplementary but central to Phaedo, prompting a reconsideration of Platonic thought and its connection to embodied human experience.

The paper aims to address the problem of the separation of body and soul in Plato’s Phaedo, in search of both its ontological features and moral consequences. Apart from the normal approach and use of dialogue as a literary and philosophical milestone for all body-soul dualisms in the history of philosophy, I believe two different ways of understanding this separation are outlined in the dialogue. The first one would indicate a moral separation, regarding what a philosopher should take care of: philosophers are supposed to mind the soul and not the body. A different way to address this separation between body and soul is the one I would like to consider as an ontological separation: the soul is so independent from the body that is declared to survive after its death. In a way, the dualistic ontology of individuals forcefully follows the bodily engagement of a chameleon-like soul in its wandering, both epistemological and moral, through the sensible world.

This paper aims to look at the ancient city of Athens and some of its political challenges through the eyes of Plato. I will do this by relating two concepts that permeate Plato's political concerns: democracy and misology. Beyond the tragic event of Socrates' death at democratic hands, there is perhaps something even deeper in Plato's struggle to see democracy as something that can work, so to speak. Plato no doubt has a profoundly pessimistic view of the human being. And the city, who was traditionally supposed to educate men, is not delivering anymore (if ever). First of all, Plato clearly identifies the origin of political and social instability in the economic imbalance between πλοῦτος (richness) and πενία (poverty). Secondly, Plato's diagnosis, what his eyes are seeing, is even more perceptive and accurate. He outlines a second source of problem for democracy, one the probably resonate even more dramatically in our very present days: one that Socrates calls misology in the Phaedo: the hatred of discourses. Apart from the fact that there is a significant distance and a radical difference between the democracy of the 5th and 4th centuries, when Plato actually writes his dialogues, the most relevant question that emerges from the investigation is probably that a democracy itself is not something stable, an ontological object, not even today. And Plato was well aware of all this.

Are there beliefs to which any human being is allowed epistemic access? Does science offer us the theoretical and practical resources necessary to lead us to attain knowledge separately from the sphere of non-epistemic values? This work investigates whether the historical prevalence of conceptions regarding convergence in epistemic rationality and neutrality of science in the notion of scientists as well as of laypersons finds a solid foundation in the philosophical reflection on science, having chosen the challenge of extracting impacts of moral consequences from the works of Thomas Kuhn. Key words: Thomas Kuhn, Bioethics, convergence in epistemic rationality, neutrality of science.