Suchergebnisse

The work 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' (1543) installed the foundation stone of a mentality that conceived a new rationality model. The heliocentric hypothesis devised by Nicolas Copernicus has entered the contemporary narrative as one of the battles fought against medieval cosmology, which translates into a confrontation with the socio-political hegemony that the Catholic Church projected on the most decisive questions of humanity. Nevertheless, cosmology, seen through a hermeneutic gaze proposed by Ernst Cassirer, allows us to suspend the ascending condition of history in order to direct our attention to the neoplatonic, Pythagorean and Gnostic filiation of certain qualities that finally played in favour of the acceptance of the new image of the world. These doctrines were key in the articulation of that new cosmology, and nevertheless, our modernity has not known how to recognize its contributions to what could be a history of ideas. For these reasons we will relate the work with some cosmological precepts in the epistemological context of the Renaissance, which will shed light on certain unknown areas of the work, and also, why not, on certain unknown areas of the spirit of our modernity.

Eminent critical evaluations on Machiavelli's thought discuss the Fortuna-Virtù pair. Even though such terms share well-known origins and traditions throughout Latin literary historiography, especially ancient and medieval receptions during civic humanism, their elusive features persist in Machiavelli´s arguments, enabling numerous academic debates. While the idea of Virtù maintain its ambivalence and ambiguity throughout these relevant and varied textual evidences, continual pursuits for clarification are made throughout the Florentine secretary's corpus, associating the term with other important and central concepts, e.g., desiderio, stato, forza. Political instabilities, forces beyond human control, unpredictability of civil actions are recurring themes in Machiavelli's conceptions of Fortune. In open dialogue with civic humanists who emphasize a crescent political and social participation, blending rational reflections, moral consideration, as well as discussions about different forms of regimes, this author exposes a historiographical conception, reinvigorating ancient traditions, in the creation of a civil order. This demands Virtù, a personal and public commitment in the exaltation of human potentialities and limits. Reinserting the relevance of a parity between Fortuna and Virtù in Machiavelli is a relevant step for avoiding anachronistic readings. Thus, the most significant examples of civic founders and maintainers of civic order are investigated, e.g., Romulo, Numa, Moses, Cesare Borgia, Castruccio Castracani. By studying the images of Fortune, in face of Machiavelli´s political and anthropological conceptions, the argumentative development of some main ideas of this famous political thinker sustains the centrality of the Virtù-Fortuna dyad.

The present article aims to sketch a parallel between two works of political philosophy: the unfinished pamphlet "From the Kingdom or Government of the Princes to the King of Cyprus" by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the well-known "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli. The collation of texts allows direct approximations between two distant philosophical moments through the similar theme, through the philosophical treatment of the classical tradition, and through the subtlety of the argument that relates the common good to the private, in the political relations. The analysis is divided into two thematic parts: the definition of ruler, and the characteristics of his craft. In Thomas, the influence of Aristotelian politics is articulated with the way in which the private purpose of the ruler is established in a hierarchy of ends that justifies the government and is directed to the common good. In Machiavelli there is a different reception of ancient thought, connected with Roman rhetoric, and a hierarchy of ends, which is directed, similarly to the Tomasian, for the common good, but with a different treatment as to how public good relates to the private good of both the ruler and the people subjected to him. From this comparison we conclude that there is a need to establish the complexity of political philosophy in the passage from the middle ages to the renaissance that removes the idea of ​​a total rupture and allows us to understand how the modern age keep medieval elements and develops them much more than abandon them.

Since Plato, death has been a recurring theme in the history of philosophy and the Hellenistic schools of thought. The "death" subject became a daily reflection particularly in Epicureanism and in Stoicism, from which not only the term meditatio mortis comes from, but an entire literature, including the writings made in the medieval times that had the final moment of life as their central point. Thus, in the 16th century, the period when Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) lived his life, meditation on death was a rhetorical topos. Nevertheless, his Essays approach the theme of death not only from a literary standpoint, but as a daily meditation, as a spiritual exercise. In this perspective, this article suggests that Montaigne, far beyond a rhetorical approach, attempts to recover the most original meaning that the Hellenistic schools of thought gave to meditatio mortis, taking this concept as a preparation for life itself, as a constant way of observing the present, faced with an imminent scenario of various deaths, such as the Black Death epidemic and the civil war in Montaigne troubled times.

In the paper, we will study Olavo de Carvalho's thought, focusing on his position regarding Brazilian and American Black movement in its struggle for reparation in terms of colonialism-slavery-racism. We will argue that his refusal of any reparatory praxis to political-cultural minorities and his position of a non-place for Black-African traditions in the context of Western culture/civilization, as with respect to his defense of the inferiority of Black-African culture-civilization when compared to Jewish-Christian, Greek-Latin and Medieval-Renaissance tradition, is pervaded by a dualist metaphysics with a highly anti-modern and anti-modernizing character, in which the dynamic of streamlining of "human drama about universe and eternity" is constituted (a) by the struggle between natural necessity (Behemont) and individual consciousness (Leviathan), that can only be won by the correlation of divine grace given by Jesus Christ and personal direct and immediate interiorization and intuition by each individual with God; (b) by the refusal of politics, history and intersubjective action as basically materialism and, in this sense, as the sphere of totalitarian political ideologies (to which Enlightnment modernity is the biggest example); and, finally, (d) by the centrality of spiritualism, of intimate and direct relation between God and man, mediated by Revelation, which points to the non-existence, in the Olavo de Carvalho' thought, of objective parameters to rational discussion, interaction and justification - that is the reason of his delegitimation of science, politics, history and macro-structural institutional action, and his appeal to methodological, intuitionist and spiritualist individualism.