The purpose of this article is to examine the recent historiography of modern political thought (Skinner, Millar, Straumann and Lee), which now fully agrees with D'Addio and Gierke that it was Roman law that played a fundamental role in the development of the idea of popular sovereignty and the doctrine of the social contract; and this thanks to the contribution of the legal humanist Salamone who, in 1513, definitively demonstrated the falsity of the medieval theory of the translatio imperii unintentionally promoted by Ulpian (according to which the Roman people irrevocably transferred sovereign power to the prince Octavian Augustus through the Lex Regia) and the validity of the words of Pomponius, according to which the Roman people elected princes not as masters or legibus solutus, but as ministers, since tyranny and principality are irreconcilable systems by nature. Today, this current of modern historiography takes for granted the idea that the theory of concessio imperii, developed by Salamone himself in De Principatu, forged the general principle of popular sovereignty-the political power of the People is superior to that of the Prince-which was later taken up by Calvinists and French humanists (as well as by the Spanish philosophers and jurists of the School of Salamanca). Besides, this theory would have been the true foundation of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty and the social contract as conceived by Rousseau, who in his Du contrat social considers the Roman Republic as an example to be followed.
The present work analyses the Thucydides' influence in Hobbes' anthropology, in spite of the fact that he never referred to Thucydides in his political theory works. For this to be, in first place, reference is made to the context of production and to the preliminary writings of the edition of Hobbes' translation of the Peloponnesian War. Secondly, four notions are identified in the Greek thinker's text: immanent cause, human nature, passions and hiding. Thirdly, we demonstrate how the British thinker appropriates such notions utilizing the geometric method and modern mechanistic metaphysics. Finally, we conclude that this reception provides the possibility of elevating to universal and self-evident categories the Thucydides' notions, and in such case part of Hobbes' political philosophy would attempt to be a synthesis between classic humanism and modern natural science. This allows, on the one hand, to rethink the link between the classical and modern world, and, on the other hand, the possibility of extracting trans-historical concepts that can explain different political conjunctures.
In this work, we investigate the method used by Juan de Borja to convince the readers of his doctrine. The author puts his rhetorical resources at the service of his Thomistic teleological moral evaluation system, to convince the reader of its importance. In Empresas Morales (1680), Borja proposes the reader to consider the value of earthly things in relation to the ultimate aim. We can see an important influence of Saint Thomas Aquinas's theory of the sign in his work. According to that theory, emblems have a transcendent objective: to persuade the readers of the proposed moral evaluations, in order to convince them of the importance of a true moral reform.
The purpose of this article is to study the treatment of the concept of anima mundi in three central figures of Renaissance philosophy: Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giordano Bruno. To achieve this, I analyze Cusa's conception of anima mundi in his works De docta ignorantia II (1440) and Idiota. De mente (1450). Subsequently, I study the place of the World Soul in Ficinian ontology in selected passages of works such as De amore (1469), Theologia platonica (1482) and the third book of De vita triplici (1489). Finally, I examine the reception of the Platonic concept of anima mundi in the natural philosophy of Giordano Bruno, mainly from the reading of De la causa, principio et Uno (1584) and Lampas triginta statuarum (1586), complementing it when relevant by considerations from other works in his Italian and Latin production. The aim is to analyze the continuities and transformations of the concept of anima mundi in the three philosophers mentioned.
This article examines the evolution of the concept of virtue from classical antiquity to modernity, with special attention to its reception in Rome and its transformation in the Christian and modern eras. A distinction is made between the theory of virtue and the compendiums of virtues, analyzing the Platonic and Aristotelian models, and projecting onto the modern world the main problems-factionalism, greed, and lack of freedom-that Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus considered as causes of the moral decline of their time. The text explores how modernity marked a rupture with the tradition of virtue ethics, which underwent various inflections, and how it believed it could overcome these same problems by relying on the rule of law backed by the state, the primacy of legal order, and the invisible action of interest-aggregation mechanisms. Finally, it is argued that the persistence of these issues confirms the ongoing need for virtue ethics as a key to addressing contemporary challenges.
