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In this highly original interpretation of Machiavelli's thought, Anthony J. Parel identifies a theme generally neglected in the scholarship of this sixteenth-century political thinker: Machiavelli's belief in the occult forces of heaven and humors. Challenging the current tendency to view Machiavelli as a pioneer of modern political science, Parel argues instead that a premodern cosmology and anthropology underlie Machiavelli's political works. Parel shows that Machiavelli's world picture owes more to the astrological cosmology prevalent in the Renaissance than to the Aristotelian or Platonic or Christian world picture. This astrological determination significantly affects Machiavelli's conceptions of history, politics, and religion and shapes his notions of virtu and fortuna. It also has considerable impact on his ethical ideas: the Machiavellian cosmos has no room for a Ruling Mind or for the Sovereignty of the Good, and humans are left to pursue their appetites for riches and glory as best they can. In a similar fashion, says Parel Machiavelli's political anthropology is influenced by the ancient idea that body humors determine a person's temperament and behavior, for he believes that humors compromise human autonomy and rationality. According to Parel, the theory of humors also affects Machiavelli's view of the body politic and his characterization of republics, princedoms, and licenzia, and Parel explicates this in new readings of The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories

AbstractThis paper presents a synopsis, in picture form of the essence of the tetrahedral, conceptual model proposed in the original paper 'A Philosophical Inquiry into the Geometry of Knowledge.' This proposed model is only for humans of planet Earth and clearly illustrates that each individual sees the world differently. The concepts expressed were developed from an analysis of the 48 basic measure formulas of physics. They determine the repetitious tetrahedral pattern inherent throughout the model. Suggested redefinitions of several terms and concepts in the areas of chemistry and physics are necessary to satisfy this model of cosmic reality.

Cosmos and Society in Oceania. Daniel de Coppet and André Iteanu. eds. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995. 338 pp.

Though the Brundtland report (no publication information provided) purports to stem from well-intendtioned concern, it is bureaucratic, anthropocentric, & exploitive, & it reflects the mechanical mind-set of a club of Western experts who conceive of the world in terms of human & natural resources, instead of human beings & nature, & see the salvation of the world in the application of better technology & management. The Earth, however, cannot be reduced to a repressive, machine philosophy. Such an orientation saps the lifeblood of the Earth & its inhabitants, & changes a magic cosmos full of mystery & worthy of celebration into a cosmos of disenchantment. D. Generoli

This essay raises the question of the character and status of imagination in ancient Greek philosophy. It is often said that neither Plato nor Aristotle conceived of imagination in genuinely productive terms. The point, however, is not approaching ancient thought while thinking with Kant, as if we were looking for proto-Kantian insights in antiquity. Ancient thought is not a series of 'tentative steps' destined to reach a full-blown articulation in modernity, let alone an anticipation of the first critique. On the contrary, it is essential to acknowledge the discontinuities that make the ancient discourse remote and, in many respects, opaque, hidden from us. On the ground of such assumptions, the essay addresses the understanding of imagination (eikasia, phantasia) in the Greek context, focusing in particular on Plato's Timaeus. First, we consider how imagination, precisely in its creative aspect, operates at the very heart of philosophical argumentation. Plato's emphatic awareness of this disallows the rhetoric of philosophy as the discipline of truth (of apodictic necessity, objectivity, and neutrality). In fact, it calls for a profound re-thinking of the relation between creativity and the philosophical turn to the 'things themselves.' Timaeus imagines the cosmos as a theatrical device: the place of seeing and being seen, of contemplation and the originary emergence of images. This evokes an understanding of imagination outside the order of subjectivity and its faculties, i.e., a meditation on the impersonal character of production and the force of images (of symbols) arising without being constituted by 'me.'