Un caso antico di resistenza al determinismo. La «teoria dei climi» in Ippocrate, Platone e Aristotele

The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief critical history of the so-called «climate theory», focusing on its earliest formulation in the thought of Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The aim is to assess whether their reflections on this doctrine already contained a key element that would shape it in later periods: the deterministic explanation of physical, moral and intellectual differences between peoples, in which climate played a decisive role. By highlighting both analogies and divergences between the three authors through close textual analysis, the paper shows that none of them embraces a strict determinism that ascribes predictive power to the natural or cultural environment. Rather, all three present a complex dialectic between φύσις and νόμος that, despite ethnographic differences, ultimately does not undermine the unity of human nature.