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This article seeks to return to the corpus of knowledge of the sixteenth century, a time understood as the Era of similarities, second reading of Michel Foucault. We are interested in the approximation of the practical order of the period - rich in signs and spellings - in order to pause in its proper conception of the world - rich in symbology. In this analysis, the Renaissance world will be involved in an intensification of the ordination exercise, governed by forms according to which similarities become known: the so-called figures of similarities - signatura, convenientia, aemulatio, analogia and simpatia. In addition, adhering to a background of general configuration, the notion of circle as a figurative referential will be emphasized, which can be understood in the understanding of the general space of Renaissance knowledge. From the notion of circle we shall refer to the practice of circulation of similarities, and through this we shall indicate a Renaissance world deciphered or interpreted according to an exhaustible network, within the limits of the circular orbits emanating from the adjustment of similarities. In practice, the use of a symbolic marking - inclusive, extended to the cosmic dimension - enables us to visualize an arrangement of how, through the ordering of knowledge, certain dispositions are promoted "between" and "for" things and people in the world.

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.

Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), chancellor and historian, is the author of one of the main praises of the city of Florence of this period. In writing to Laudatio florentinae urbis (1403-1404), the humanist describes Florence and its government as a well-ordered, beautiful, wholesome, free and participatory city. The paper analyzes this text not only as a rhetorical piece, but highlights the republican ideals of freedom, self-government and citizenship. From an institutional point of view, Laudatio offers the foundations of mixed government, which would become a central aspect of Renaissance republicanism. From the ancients, Bruni removes the idea of the division of powers from the classic triad monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, with the separation of functions in each of these pure forms. Bruni points out that both aspects of antiquity can be found in the Florentine institutions of his time, in such a way that he observes in the historical fact the realization of an ancient political theory, complementing, therefore, the idealization of the city.

By dynamically adapting good examples, accommodating these to the needs imposed by circumstances, Machiavelli reverberates multiple uses of imitatio from ancient and Renaissance authors. Imitation renovates ancient Virtù in civil practices and attitudes, providing encouragement for fulfilling political actions and pedagogical practices, as Machiavelli's role as secretary of Florence and his political, historical and literary writings attest. Thus, after reviewing the notion of imitatio, specifically in antiquity and renaissance, Machiavelli's arguments about the possibility of humans reaching Virtù are contextualized in the 'Discorsi, Prince, in Florentine Histories and the Art of War', specifically in the proposals to imitate the appropriate actions. Hence, investigations and analyzes of the past produces utility and delight, enhancing the 'flavor of human actions'. Consequently, Machiavelli's writings assure the impossibility of a predetermined definition among possible multiple options (ambiguity) as well as support the possibility to simultaneously choose two, apparently antagonistic, perspectives (ambivalence).

In this article we intend undertake a reading of ancient judaism, or veterotestamentary, in some of its main aspects, in contrast to the Machiavellian view of the role of religion in the organization and expansion of the State. The first step of this enterprise will be given by exposing the founding and delineanting features of the ancient Jewish tradition, especially in the books that make up the so-called Old Testament, demonstranting the using of religion in the ordination and expansion of the State, as well as in the formation of the individual. In a second moment we will demonstrate how to create a new Jewish tradition, influenced and influential on the ancient Greek world, early in the Christian era which will be assimilated and explored in its mystical bias in Renaissance humanism. This Hellenistic Judaism tradition will be best known and assimilated in the European erudite circles of the Renaissance. Finally, we will try to demonstrate how the constitutive features of ancient Judaism, to the detriment of Hellenistic Judaism, can be read in the light of Machiavellian description of the role of religion in the organization and expansion of the State and the formation of the individual.

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.

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.