0000000000220275
AUTHOR
Tutrone
showing 4 related works from this author
Filodemo, Cicerone, Nepote: a proposito del contesto storico-culturale di Oec. Col. XXII.9-48
2018
Until recently, Philodemus’ treatise On Household Management (Περὶ οἰκονομίας, PHerc. 1424) has been mainly used as a source for the reconstruction of early Epicurean economic thought (especially of Metrodorus’ writing Περὶ πλούτου). Over the past few years, however, scholars have called attention to Philodemus’ creative (yet philosophically orthodox) readaptation of Epicurean ethical and social theories to the needs of contemporary Roman society. Following this scholarly line, the present paper reassesses a passage from On Household Management (col. XXII.9–48) which has so far been interpreted as an unoriginal repetition of Metrodorus’ arguments, and situates it in the cultural context of …
Coming to Know Epicurus’ Truth: Distributed Cognition in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura
2020
Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res cogitans, non extensa), enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. According to the so-called distributed cognition thesis (and its more “radical” version, the extended mind hypothesis), “the thinker in this world is a very special medium that can provide coordination among many structured media – some internal, some externa…
Dumb Animals: A Short History of Classical Logocentrism
2021
Among the most common and influential stereotypes of Greco-Roman literature is the idea that animals are ‘dumb’ (ἄλογα/muta), that is, mute and devoid of reason. In recent years, several explorations of what Stephen Newmyer has aptly called the ‘man alone of animals’ topos have pointed out that in asserting the privileged status of humans the ancients attached special importance to articulate language. Yet, most of these explorations have adopted a thematic rather than historical approach in an attempt to provide a comparative assessment of ancient and modern paradigms. In the present paper, I follow a historical line through the literary representations of animals as ‘dumb’, focusing on tw…
Disumano, troppo umano. La maschera del tiranno e l’antropologia dei filosofi (da Sofocle a Seneca)
2019
Tyranny is often regarded as "a perennial problem" (Boesche 1996) on the basis of its ubiquitous presence in literature. Even more enduring is the problem of how to define human nature, its place in the environment, and its relationship to the divine – a core issue of philosophical anthropology (Pansera 2001, Honenberger 2015). In the present paper, I shall approach the literary construction of the tyrant figure in Greek and Roman tragedy from the holistic perspective of philosophical anthropology. I will focus on three well-known dramas (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone and Seneca’s Thyestes) which put great emphasis on the moral and cognitive status of tyrants as “exceptional” hum…