Ubi finitur armorum vis. Ontologia e geometria politica nel dibattito moderno sulla sovranità dei mari (1355-1782)

Throughout the course of the modern age, legal-political philosophy has been challenged by the problem of the freedom or sovereignty of the seas. After the solutions initially proposed by Bartolus of Saxoferrato and Baldus de Ubaldis to establish the exact extension of the territorial sea, the debate became paradigmatic thanks to the querelle between Grotius (author of Mare liberum) and Selden (author of Mare clausum). The dispute continued with the analyses of Paolo Sarpi, Cornelius van Bynkershoek, Immanuel Kant and Ferdinando Galiani. The controversy over territorial seas is one of the crucial moments of the modern age. In it, the relationship between the agency of the subject and the space is radically rethought, proposing two theoretical diagrams: an ontological-political one, in which the subject is a function of the space; a geometrical-political one, in which the space is a function of the subject. The essay traces this debate identifying the theoretical issues on which it is based.