Memory studies in Trento – Multidisciplinary perspectives (con Antoine Houlou-Garcia e Manuela Valle)

Antoine Houlou-Garcia (Unitn/EHESS Parigi), Graphic memory and conceptual oblivion of the Greek zero / Memoria grafica e oblio concettuale dello zero greco

Antoine will present the strange fate of the little-known Greek zero: the number zero of Iamblichus then voluntarily forgotten and the positional zero of the Greek astronomers from which we derived “our” today's zero.

Antoine Houlou-Garcia is a research associate at the EHESS-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and linguistic collaborator at the University of Trento. His main research interests are democracy, the history of political ideas, and the mathematization of political theory. Among his recent publications, the book Il était une fois le zéro (Alisio, 2023). 

Manuela Valle (Unitn, filosofia antica), Strategies for immortality in Plato’s dialogues / Strategie di immortalità nei dialoghi platonici

When philosophers seek for the world of ideas, they seek immortality in a special way, but, with poets, legislators, inventors, ordinary fathers and mothers, they share the more common strategy of aiming for immortality through the stratagem of the birth-giving. What kind of immortality does birth-giving offer? It seems to me that Plato does not propose the distinction, known to Aristotle, between biological immortality, relating to the species, and historical immortality, based on memory, relating to the individual. For Plato, of the Symposium (207d-209e) and of the Crito (46b-53e), one saves themselves from the inexorable flow of becoming by relying on their own memory and the memory of the others. Each one must remember themselves to affirm their identity, beyond the change of everything within themselves. And each one will keep living in the memory of others, thanks to their children – every kind of children: the children of the soul and those who are, also but not exclusively, children of the body. 
The immortality that is thus offered to mankind, unlike the divine one, is imperfect, because we will only save ourselves by becoming, in part, something else and it is not guaranteed, because it is always exposed to the risk of fallibility. Alcibiades' intrusion at Agathon's house proves this.
 
Manuela Valle, PhD in Philosophy, is a teacher of History and Philosophy at the A. Rosmini high school in Rovereto (Italy) and collaborates with the University of Trento, where her disciplinary area is History of Ancient Philosophy. For Loffredo she published Un’antica discordia. Platone e la poesia: Ione, Simposio, Repubblica, Sofista (2016). She is a Member and Advisor of the Rovereto Accademia degli Agiati. Her research focuses on Plato and Platonism.