The spherical Earth and the transcendental view in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Abstract

The text proposes a study of the conception of the spherical Earth based on some models of Greek philosophy, with emphasis on Anaximander and Plato. Notes on pre-Socratic philosophy are established, whose study of nature is marked by mutations in mythology, as well as by the innovative approach of Babylonian astronomy. It is noteworthy that the intellectual activity of the philosophers of nature was part of a specific historical context, which involved the insertion of political issues, such as the advent of the polis and the resulting spatial organization. Concepts regarding of the shape of the earth are presented in the mythologies of Homer and Hesiod, as well as the contextualization of pre-Socratic and Platonic cosmologies. We end by pointing to the transcendental character of the imaginations regarding the spherical earth in the context of philosophy, and its influence on the Roman author Cicero.