PROFILO DI MARIO VEGETTI

Abstract

Mario Vegetti (1937-2018) was one of the most important and influential historians of ancient thought. He renewed this discipline by embracing areas that were once marginal, such as medicine, biology, zoology, and by inytroducing innovative methods, such as anthropology, sociology, historical epistemology. Vegetti inaugurated the studies of the history of medicine, with the translation and the commentaries of the works of Hippocrates and Galen. In collaboration with Diego Lanza he investigated the processes that gave rise to the “ideology of the city”. He has long dealt with the ethical and moral thought of ancient philosophers (espec. Aristotle and the Stoics). In the last decades his interests have focused on Plato's ethical and political thought, of which he has provided an innovative and very stimulating interpretation.