Archytas

In the Middle Ages, the idea of legislative sovereignty was expressed with reference to a host of commonplace arguments, such as pater legis, Sol Iustitiae, or lex animata. And many believe that it was the Roman legal concept of animate law which eventually laid the foundation for the elaboration of the idea of absolute power in the late Middle Ages. If this hypothesis is correct, the philosophic background of some late medieval and early modern absolutistic doctrines of political government could (...) be sought after as early as the classical Greek descriptions of a king who is nomos empsychos, that is, a living law. In this article, I intend to consider this intellectual tradition, and raise some doubts about the merits of the above claim, arguing instead for a separate consideration of the individual sources of the nomos empsychos concept. As such, I am tracing the genealogy of the expression to the fifth-century Pythagorean, Archytas of Tarentum, and I am demonstrating that originally the nomos empsychos was inseparably associated with an intrinsically Archytean tradition. (shrink)

For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

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. (shrink)