Elena, Palamede e l’enigma della colpa: percezione, emozione, volontà

Gorgias’ two speeches Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes face, from different points of view, the problem of free will, deliberation and responsibility. While Palamedes is introduced as hero of the kratos, Helen can be considered as a victim of persuasion and erotic passion. My aim is to analyze Gorgias’ emphasis on sight and hearing as perceptions related to the origin of our actions: powerful perceptions can give rise to violent emotions and force people to change their nature, becoming different from what they previously were. By focusing on the Hippocratic medicine and ancient doctrines about the physiology of perception, we can shed new light on the arguments used by Gorgias in order to defend Helen overwhelmed by the seduction of logos and eros. What the Sophist is mainly interested in is the connection between perception, emotion, and our consequent disposition to act.

Searching for a Dialogue

The paper aims to examine the linguistic relationship between patients and physicians in the context of the therapeutic relationship. It focuses on the Hippocratic treatises and offers a detailed commentary of a controversial passage of Ancient Medicine par. 2.3. The dialogical model of Ancient Medicine is found to be centred on the patient’s experience; this same idealized model of relation is documented in Plato’s Laws. In the second part of the article the author examines some linguistic peculiarities of medical discourse, such as the use of comparisons and metaphors, and a passage from Galen’s On the Affected Parts that reports the case of a young patient and the difficulties inherent in the dialogue between patient and physician.

Sulle varianti d’autore

The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of author variants in the humanistic age, starting from a survey of the variants added by Petrarch to his unfinished work Africa during the revision of the text around the mid-fourteenth century. In particular, two new definitions of variant, which were presented in a previous paper, are here outlined and discussed, that is, ‘active variants’ and ‘working variants’. Furthermore, the so-called Scevola Mariotti’s norm in relation to the author variants’ authenticity is reviewed.

Percorsi della ricerca in filologia slava dal XIX secolo

The paper deals with the methods developed in the field of Slavic philological research in the last centuries. The mission of Cyril and Methodius in Great Moravia and the activity of their disciples in the First Bulgarian Empire of Boris and Simeon laid to the foundation of a Slavic cultural and religious autonomy. The major problem of Cyril and Methodius’ studies has been to find the traces of their translations and to identify the area where the Palaeoslavic texts originated. The debate between R. Picchio and D. Lichačev revealed the clash between two different traditions in Slavic philological and literary studies; it opened a dialogue between Slavic and European scholars and led to a vast methodological and terminological renewal in the discipline. It was debated whether it was possible to apply to Slavic texts the methods developed in the field of Greek and Latin tradition, or a separate discipline Textology would be necessary for studying the history of Slavic texts and the conscious changes introduced by their coauthors and coeditors. A Linguistic Textology has also been created which limits the philological research to linguistic data. The article touches the new methods developed for the reconstruction of the Cyrill and Methodius’ Bible by means of the digitally supported profile-method applied to the editions of the Slavic Gospels. It is only at the beginning of this century that there has been a return to the method of textual criticism.

The Problem of the Absent I

One of the greatest paradoxes of ancient Greek lyric poetry is its fundamental tension between the vivid evocation of a performance communicative context and the capability of the text to transcend the context itself. A key aspect of this is the way in which language can exploit both poles of this tension: the presentness of the performance and the transcendence of the text. This is a source of crucial interpretative problems, as well as of complex expressive potentialities. The focus of this paper is to examine some of the ways in which the shift of the use of first person indexicals serves the dialogue between text and performance, proceeding through three stages. In the first place I briefly analyze some different genres of discourse (drama, epistle, lyric) that in Archaic and Classical Greek display a complex use of indexicality calling attention to the ‘mediated’ nature of the communication process (§ 2). In the second stage I revise some examples of ‘mediated’ indexicality in Greek lyric in general (§ 3) and in Pindaric poetry in particular (§ 4). In the third stage I locate these cases within a wider comparative approach, exploring a suitable theoretical explanation of this important feature (§ 5).

Tradizione e prassi editoriale dei testi etiopici: un breve sguardo d’insieme

The tradition of Ethiopic texts, although characterized by a particular temporal articulation of its own that distinguishes texts from Antiquity and Late Antiquity and texts of the medieval age, has been and is the object of study of a philology that shares the history and paradigms of the other philologies of the Christian East; like these, throughout the course of the twentieth century and almost without exception, the criterion unwittingly selected and adopted as the norm of the ‘base manuscript’ dominated. Unlike the other philologies, however, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, the Italian school of Ethiopian studies renewed by Paolo Marrassini and eventually appreciated also in Europe and in Ethiopia, has largely applied the Neo-Lachmannian reconstructive stemmatic method to Ethiopic texts. Even in the absence of universal consensus, this method is still the only one that has prompted a theoretical-methodological reflection on the phenomenology of Ethiopic texts.

Galen’s Surgical Commentaries in Oribasius’ Collectiones medicae

In books 46–49 of the Collectiones medicae, Oribasius collects a remarkable number of text excerpts, varying in size, from Galen’s commentaries on Hippocrates’ surgical treatises (In the surgery, On fractures, and On joints). Besides being a witness of indirect tradition for the surviving Greek text of the commentaries, these excerpts offer good overall specimens of Oribasius’ writing method. The paper analyzes some significant examples, in order to highlight Oribasius’ compilatory technique and the strategies he adopted to overcome the difficulties in building a continuous text moving from a non-continuous one.

Textual Criticism and Bibliography: The Case of Qurʾānic Studies

Philological studies on Arabic and Islamic literature have traditionally been limited in many respects. The approaches to the texts and their editing have mostly reflected a primary interest in diffusing texts without sharing the editing methodology or discussing the specific problematic aspects of Arabic. In the realm of Qurʾānic studies most of the research has been devoted to the formation of the text and early manuscript evidence with some significant results but without addressing many other aspects and critical problems which still await the attention of scholarly research. Later manuscript attestations and the history of the printed Qurʾān have also been in general neglected fields of critical research.

Lezioni adiafore, errori separativi, contaminazione nascosta

Some problems that arise over the three concepts named in the title are discussed with the help of passages drawn from classical Latin works.