Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental (...) human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness. (shrink)

This article suggests that human action in Machiavelli is both materialistic and temporalized. It further argues that Reinhart Koselleck’s view of Machiavelli’s understanding of time as historical circularity is misleading. The author is making the case that Machiavelli drew from Lucretian materialism to strip political concepts of content via an animal-materialist anthropology and ontology holding that man, as any animal, is material reality acting under an atomic arrangement wherein no time, whether linear or circular, can exist. The conclusion is that (...) Koselleck’s interpretation of the circularity of time in Machiavelli kept him from seeing his role as an antecedent of the conceptual and temporal revolution underlying the Sattelzeit. (shrink)

The humanist Giovanni Giovano Pontano wrote five dialogues, although only two of them were published during his lifetime. The last one, entitled Aegidius in honor of Giles of Viterbo, represents a conversation held in the context of the “Accademia Pontaniana” between a series of speakers who discuss the role of eloquence, the importance of combining sacred letters with profane ones, astrology, the immortality of the soul and the Aristotelian philosophical lexicon. We present an introduction to the main topics of this (...) dialogue which accompany the Spanish translation of the Aegidiusincluded in this issue. (shrink)