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This paper offers a new interpretation of the unity of the human soul’s parts in De Anima II.3, drawing on the mathematical notion of dimension. Dimensionality, understood as an intrinsic property that parameterises a system’s complexity by the number of its independent yet ordered parameters, provides a suitable framework for explaining the unity of the tripartite human soul. The nutritive, the perceptual, and the intellectual parts emerge as three definitionally distinct yet operationally ordered dimensions of a human being. Though anachronistic, this dimensional account is philosophically fruitful: it effectively unifies three structural features of the soul’s parts – serial order, potential containment, and teleological subordination – identified in recent scholarship (Johansen 2012, 2014; Corcilius 2015, 2023, 2025).

Karl Popper has hitherto been understood as either a liberal or, at best, as a sui generis specimen of socialism. I argue that his political thought bears a remarkable resemblance to what Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner have dubbed the Italo-Atlantic branch of republicanism. Viewing Popper through a republican lens would reveal that there is a robust and coherent theory behind his attack on the “enemies of the open society”. The paper focuses successively on the concept of freedom understood as nondomination, on the role of the state and the rule of law, and on democracy. That Popper might be classified “as a republican, in something close to Pettit’s sense” has been suggested in passing by Jeremy Shearmur on a handful of occasions. The present article, however, should be the first to focus on the similarities in detail.

This paper explores what was meant by the face in various genres in antiquity from the earliest times to the beginning of Hellenism. The face originally represented a place where strong feelings were expressed, especially grief, shame and disgrace. If the face was somehow damaged or questioned, it diminished a person‘s value in life and after death and brought with it shame for the person and those close to him. Descriptions of the face were for a long time only very brief and general, but they still served to make aesthetic and moral judgments or to suggest how one‘s face should look in a particular situation. This prescriptive aspect was intensified in physiognomy, which, however, concentrated only on some partial features of the face (especially the eyes), while the face itself or as a whole was given little consideration. Physiognomists did not strive to depict the individual as faithfully as possible, but rather tried to identify him or her with one of a limited number of character types and to determine his or her proximity or distance to ideal values and models. Similar efforts and practices can also be observed in Greek portraiture and theatre, probably not only due to the influence of physiognomy. Although the Greeks gradually began to create more realistic and individualised portraits, they were generally more interested in typological features of the face and character.

Aristotle, as well as some other ancient scholars, ascribe to Thales of Miletus the conception of Earth floating on water. Current researchers tend to view this ascription as well-founded, but there are reasons to suppose that it does not reflect Thales’s authentic views. To wit, already in antiquity there were doubts regarding the existence of Thales’s treatise. Reports which describe his views regarding the shape of the Earth and the substance which heavenly bodies consist of are, moreover, provably based on much later concepts. Above all, archaic Ionian cosmologies tended to view the earth as the lower boundary of the universe and not as a cosmic body, the Earth, that might need some external physical support. Aside from that, it is likely that the notion of Earth resting on water was of a Near Eastern origin. When Aristotle claims that this was the oldest conception of Earth at his disposal, he may have anachronically ascribed it to Thales, whom he considered one of the oldest thinkers in the Greek philosophical tradition. Reports which describe Thales’s cosmology are thus influenced by much later conceptions and views.

The article focuses on Greek and Latin interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs and its similarity and possible relation to the classical art of memory and the (almost lost) methods of Greek mnemonics. The first part points to the differences between the Egyptian and Greek view on script and written sources, based mostly on mythological stories about the origin(s) of writing. The next part briefly explains the ancient interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, focusing on Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica and other sources. The third and last part of the study considers a possible relation of that interpretation to the art of memory. The mechanisms of creating images in ars memoriae, of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Greek interpretation of them are compared and possible a (re)-use of hieroglyphic signs in some form of Greek mnemonics is suggested.