FEDERICA PIANGERELLI Alle origini del confronto con l’alterità Barbaroi e xenoi nel pensiero greco antico Una indagine storico-filosofica

Given the new forms of racism rampant in societies contemporary societies, the research intends to study the topic from a novel historical-philosophical perspective. Indeed, the thesis explores the origins of the confrontation with otherness, taking as its identity center of gravity the ancient Greek world and as figures of the outsider the barbaros, i.e. the "non-Greek stranger," and the xenos, i.e., the "Greek stranger." Far from comparing irreducibly distant worlds, such as the Ancient and the Contemporary, this argumentative move responds to the need to understand whether and how classical reflection can offer models hermeneutics useful for navigating the complexity of the present. Alongside this broader purpose, the inquiry also pursues a more specific purpose: to reconstruct, especially but not only, the position of philosophers, from Thales to Aristotle, in regard to barbaros and the xenos. This, in fact, deserves to be emphasized because it follows a dynamic of comparison, sometimes contrasting, with the Greek cultural imaginary, increasingly colonized by a stubborn ideology. At a glance from above at the three chapters into which the paper is divided (1. Greek Perspectives on the Barbarian Worlds. From the reflections of the Presocratics to that of Aristotle, via the Sophists, Hippocrates and Plato; 2. Foreign relations in the Greek world. The contribution of Plato; 3. The practices of hospitality and paths of welcome beyond the philosophy), as well as on the final appendix (The Athenian civic myth of autochthony. Some critical reflections) at least two junctures stand out. conceptual underpinnings. On the one hand, the "critical posture" stands out, that is, the deep attention that various thinkers pay to the analysis of the articulated constitutive logics of the encounter with those differences that pose a radical question at the heart of Greek identity. On the other, there emerges the "problematizing attitude," that is, the structure of thought common to all authors, which invites one to go beyond the surface of events to be provoked by the infinite richness of being and to choose the "shortest" path only when it is the reality itself to demand it.