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In Plato’s philosophy, political practice relies on dialectical knowledge. This bond between knowledge and praxis legitimizes the assignment of government to the philosophers (R. 473c ff.) and represents the ground for the image of the politician as the true “pilot” of a ship who looks “upwards” as an attentive “observer of the sky” seeking to comprehend the ideal paradigm (488a7-489a2). Nevertheless, this image seems to highlight also the true politician’s disinterest in the world of political becoming and jeopardize the philosopher’s claim to govern a reality that seems to lie outside his sphere of attention. To shed light on this crucial tension between knowledge and action, this article explores several passages of the Republic and the Laws, where Plato emphasizes the necessity for the politician to adopt a “double gaze”: one directed toward the ideal realm and the other toward the contingent and dynamic political sphere. Through an analysis of these passages, this paper aims to highlight a relevant aspect of Plato’s political thought and its relationship with knowledge: the philosopher tasked with governing the city must possess a more articulated knowledge, which synthesizes the ideal paradigm with the practical realities of political life into a unified, “synoptic” perspective—bridging the gap between theoretical insight and the very field of action.

The present paper interprets the notorious passage of Plato’s Sophist in which the Visitor protests against the refusal of the ‘Friends of the Forms’ to admit life and movement into that which ‘completely is’ as a philosophical provocation. It is such a provocation, first, because it challenges Plato’s own understanding of kinêsis, one seemingly incapable of adequately explaining either life itself or its inclusion in what is most real. Secondly, the passage provokes later attempts to explain how being can be both alive and intelligent. The focus here is on two contrasting attempts: Aristotle’s distinction of activity (energeia) that is complete (and thus can be attributed to what completely is) from motion as by definition incomplete; Plotinus’s rejection of this distinction in defending the completeness of motion itself.

This paper aims to analyze the human impossibility of reaching an absolute level of knowledge in Plato, with respect to the paradox of the false opinion in the Theaetetus. This interpretation is based on the limitation of human knowledge (already present in the Apology), based on the immanent characteristics of the forms, and derived from the neo-Kantian perspective. The objective is to sustain that all knowledge requires some grounding in the sensible, such as the synthetic a priori judgments, and that the problem of false opinions and the possibility of knowledge of the physical world would be the Platonic way of bringing into discussion the existence of levels of epistḗmē. In order to explain this partial access to forms, the metaphor of the tangent will be used to exemplify how knowledge is incomplete because it touches the form at several points without allowing a total apprehension, since if this epistemological totality were possible, there would be no false opinion.

Must we read Parmenides without going through Plato, as Jean Bollack asserts in the very first sentence of his book Parménide, de l'étant au monde (2006)? While relying on a radically new interpretation of B8.53-54a put forward by Bollack as early as 1966, I argue, on the contrary, that it is only on the condition of having Plato in mind that one can read the poem as a whole. The Republic or the Symposium, the Sophist and the Timaeus, taken in conjunction (and not as witnesses of a development of Plato’s thought), provide a key to grasp the meaning of the hinge between the two parts of the goddess’ exposition, which is the real core of the poem. Radicalizing a line of interpretation opened by Jonathan Barnes (1979) and Patricia Curd (1997), I argue that there is a sense in which non-being is eliminated from the second part of the goddess’ exposition, and multiplicity given a legitimate ontological status. If so, the parricide the Sophist pretends to perpetrate concerns Parmenides’ ancient interpreters rather than Parmenides himself. This is the only sense in which we could indeed say that we have to read Parmenides without going through Plato.

In its usual sense, Heraclitus’ logos was the spoken ‘word’ or ‘account,’ he presented to his audiences. But since he elsewhere called on his audiences to ‘listen not to me but to the logos’ (B 50) and characterized the logos as ‘common’ (B2), it would appear that the logos was more than just his ‘account.’ Scholars offer differing explanations of the nature of that other logos but I argue that it is best understood in connection with eight different concepts— unity, opposition, strife, justice, fire, ‘the wise’, excellence, and understanding. I argue also that Heraclitus sought to explain his philosophical views through the use of numerous poetic devices—intentional ambiguity, chiasmus, metaphor, antithesis, asyndeton, simile and hieratic speech.

In the fourth book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates reduces his young interlocutor to a position of radical doubt, on topics such as the nature of what is good and the definition of wealth and poverty (and hence of class). He proceeds to enunciate a conception of justice as equivalent to lawfulness, without, however, offering a criterion for deciding whether any given law is just. While he affirms that one must in general obey the law, once it is properly enacted (itself a problematic requirement), such respect is inevitably accompanied by an awareness of the fallibility of one’s judgment. It is suggested that such epistemic doubt serves to minimize the danger of radical polarization in politics, such as led to two civil wars in Athens.

The dossier Anthropology and Museums: Critical Perspectives, Transformations, and Challenges, published in issue 69 of the Boletín de Antropología, compiles empirical research on the relationship between anthropological practice and museology in various countries of the Americas. The contributions reflect on the challenges and possibilities of engaging museums from an anthropological perspective, highlighting the role of anthropologists not only as researchers but also as curators, mediators, and educators. The articles explore collaborative and decolonial museographic experiences, the production of narratives with a gender perspective, the mediation of sensitive collections, and virtual memory exhibitions, emphasizing the potential of museums as dynamic spaces for dialogue, education, and social transformation.

Memory museums have generated strategies that, by showing the horror of war, seek to transform violent practices in societies, using memory in a critical way as an educational and purposeful tool to imagine different futures. In Medellín, the Casa de la Memoria Museum has been serving this mission since 2011. In 2020, given the confinement, virtuality forced the rethinking of its processes and methodologies. The article reflects on the realization, that year, of the virtual exhibition “Ruptures and Roots: No|Senses of the City” that addressed the issue of forced intra-urban displacement.

The article aims to explore the process of mobilisation, training, and performance of students at different levels of education, based on the case of the exhibition The First Brazilians, held between 2006 and 2021 in different cities in Brazil and abroad. Far from thinking of it as solely responsible for these processes, the exhibition The First Brazilians as a space of confluence, in which a creative and fruitful relationship was proposed between history, time, ethnographic collections and anthropology itself, producing interactions and conditions for the emergence of new materials and social actors positioned in different fields of activity, who then began to act in their own way, generating new effects in the field of museums, anthropology, and the arts.

This paper presents the guidelines and progress of the ongoing research project “Gender Perspective in the Museographic Narratives of the Antonio Serrano Museum of Natural Sciences and Anthropology, in the city of Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina”. From a feminist and decolonial perspective, I analyze the places of representation occupied by museums and their androcentric nature. Serving as legitimizers of colonial-patriarchal processes. Furthermore, through collaborative methodologies, I aim to incorporate new narratives that include the voices of indigenous women who have been historically represented/invisibilised in archaeological and ethnographic exhibitions.