Il "corpo matematico“ nel Platonismo imperiale e tardoantico. Una breve storia di discontinuità filosofica

This paper aims to discuss the conceptions of the stereometric body in the Platonist tradition of the Imperial age and Late Antiquity. I shall first suggest that the Middle Platonists formulated an arithmo-stereometric theory, which they combined with the traditional Euclidean stereometry. This move was meant to solve a specific philosophical problem, namely the need to describe in arithmo-stereometric terms the structure of the cosmic soul in such a way as to guarantee, on the one hand, its dissimilarity with respect to the corporeality, whose "solid" structure can be described in Euclidean terms, and on the other hand, the effectiveness of the action of the soul within the physical and three-dimensional cosmos. Precisely because of the disappearance of these requirements and for an overall change of philosophical approach, starting from Plotinus, Neoplatonism will instead be able to renounce the arithmostereometry and return to a consistently Euclidean definition of the notion of stereometric body.