Seminario in lingua inglese

Martedì 4 dicembre, ore 17.00

Claudia Zichi, PhD Lund University: The Body as a Moral Agent in Plato’s Laws book 2 and 7.

“The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived”. The quote is from Mary Douglas’ Natural Symbols (2003, 72, first published 1970). Although one should be aware of the risks of undertaking anachronistic readings of ancient texts, I argue that this claim helps to clarify Plato’s advocacy for the control of dances and body movements in the city of Magnesia. In the Laws, σῶμα (body) occurs most frequently in books 2 and 7, where the Athenian lays down the legislation about the choral dances and recreational activities to be admitted in Magnesia. In this paper, I will focus on the Athenian’s desire to implement the appropriate dances for the city of Magnesia. I will investigate the fundamental educative role that the Athenian assigns to certain bodily movement. My hypothesis is that, in the Laws, the body is portrayed as a medium of moral expression that needs to be subjected to the controls exercised by the social system in which it performs.

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