Karl R. Popper lettore dei presocratici

Can we evaluate Popper's attention to Presocratics in a broader and varied interpretative framework than that claimed so far by the critics? This work provides arguments to support a general reconsideration of this research question, mainly through a study of the sources used by Popper in reading the Presocratics philosophers, which prior literature has never addressed. Introduction summarizes, in 3 sections, the critical historiography on this subject. Comments are negative and focus on the notion of an instrumental projection of the falsificationism on the ancient philosophy and also on the paradoxical fall into the historicism by an avowedly anti-historicist philosopher. The only significant exception is the strong affinity of Giovanni Cerri with Popper, which however does not prevent points of divergence. We chose to devote Chapter I to the use of the sources in the reconstruction of Parmenides' thought, identifying six recurring topics: 1. Parmenides' Goddess; 2. Elea's Moon; 3. The elenchos and the apparent anachronism; 4. The fragment B 16; 5. Eleatic verisimilitude; 6. Theme of blindness and the language issue. Chapter II describes in five sections the use of the sources in the reading of the other Presocratics, with particular attention to rediscovery of Xenophanes (section 2), to the change in Heraclitus (section 3), as well as to the relationship between Parmenides, Xenophanes and Heraclitus (section 1). The two final sections are dedicated to reconstruction of Anaximander (section 4) and Democritus (section 5). Chapter III focuses on the presence of Presocratics' philosophy in the articulation of Popper's reflection, with the aim of searching for some implications of interpretive perspectives that Popper proposed within his own philosophy. The essay of 1965 Beyond the search for invariants (section 1) is not mentioned in the set of critical historiography addressing Popper's approach to Presocratics. However this essay is the only Popperian example of discussion of contemporary epistemological questions from the ancient age through a projection of Parmenides in the modern physic (section 1.2). The text is marked by a line oriented from the past to the present: this perspective can be framed as a counterexample compared to leitmotiv of the critics, which see in the Popper's attention for the ancients a mere projection of his falsificationism on the past to find full legitimacy. Section 1.1 reconstructs the use of different sources cited in this essay by comparing them with those referred to by Popper in his contributions of subsequent years, and shows the importance of Giorgio de Santillana in the cosmological popperian reading of the second part of the Pamenides' poem as well as in the hypothesis of Xenophanes' presence in Parmenides' cosmology. In section 2 we chose to show only a few examples, from the initial to the last Popper, to prove that the reference to Presocratics has remained for the author a constant of his philosophical proposal, whose threads are unravelled and intertwined in parallel with the pages dedicated, in an almost entirely private form, to the passionate philological and historiographical considerations discussed in this work.