Ἀρετή e φύσις: tra etica del saggio e mondo naturale nell’Accademia platonica antica

In this article, I intend to analyse the relationship between the concept of virtue and the concept of nature as developed in the Old Academy, particularly in the philosophies of the scholarchs following Plato. Given that an ethicalenvironmental sensibility as we understand it today did not exist in the ancient world, I think it is useful to retrace the stages of the development of the Platonic philosophers’ way of relating to the sensible that surrounded them, in particular to the natural world, not only in order to try to reconstruct their doctrines, of which we have mainly later testimony left, or to define the historical-philosophical development of these conceptions, but above all to analyse the philosophical reasons behind their ethical attitudes and relationship to the φύσις, as a useful critical starting point for re-analysing our way of being in the world.