O estudo da poesia chamada didática mostra-se particularmente fecundo quando, dentre os variados poetas antigos, gregos e latinos, que a praticaram, escolhemos, como objeto particular de exame, um poeta como Manílio (c. I d.C.). Sua obra, os cinco cantos do poema latino Astronomica, apresenta razões de caráter poético e mesmo filosófico que nos autorizam a compará-la, por exemplo, à poesia de Lucrécio e Virgílio. Ainda que não desfrute de igual notoriedade, o poema de Manílio, como já apontaram seus poucos estudiosos, é exemplo de elocução poética, na linguagem notável pela variação técnica, e de ardorosa convicção moral, inspirada no estoicismo; também é, contudo, exemplo de um gênero poético hoje as mais das vezes relegado aos recortes das antologias, quando não ao simples esquecimento. Assim, o trabalho aqui proposto é a tradução integral do Astronomica, bem como um breve estudo introdutório acerca do poema, da tradição poética em que se insere e do gênero didático poesia, que nele muito bem se divisa. / The study of the so-called didactic poetry reveals to be particularly fruitful when, amongst the different ancient poets, greek or latin, who practiced it, we choose as our particular objet of investigation a poet like Manilius (c. 1 A.D.). His work, the five chants of the latin poem Astronomica, presents poetical and even philosophical reasons that allow us to compare it, for instance, with the poetry of Lucretius and Virgil. Even though it doesn\'t have the same notoriety, Manilius\'s poem, as few scholars have already remarked, is an example of poetic elocution, in a language remarkable for technical variation, and of an ardent moral conviction, inspired by stoicism; it is also, nevertheless, an example of a poetic genre nowadays often relegated to anthology clippings, when it is not simply forgotten. Taking these into account, the work presented here is the total translation of the Astronomica, and a brief introductory study about the poem, the poetic tradition in which it is inscribed and the didactic genre of poetry, which can easily be seen in it.

« Lisez l’histoire et le tableau » : telle est l’invitation formulée par Poussin à l’adresse d’un de ses commanditaires, etqui d’une certaine manière consacre d’emblée le bien-fondé d’une approche iconologique de ses oeuvres. Et l’artisted’affirmer ailleurs que « la nouveauté dans la peinture ne consiste pas surtout dans un sujet non encore vu, mais dans labonne et nouvelle disposition et expression, et [qu’] ainsi de commun et vieux, le sujet devient singulier et neuf ».S’agissant cependant de la part cruciale de l’inspiration de ce peintre savant que représente la transposition des auteursclassiques, nous avons constaté que ses modalités n’avaient guère retenu l’attention de la critique. Nous avons donctenté de saisir, pour reprendre les mots de Poussin, ce qui fait la nouveauté et la singularité de la manière dont il traite sesapports littéraires. Il est ainsi apparu que le parti qu’il en tire, bien moins illustratif que d’ordre herméneutique, exige uneparticipation active du spectateur, en l’occurrence invité à déceler dans ses tableaux les rapports secrets qui s’y trouvent suggérés entre plusieurs passages d’une même oeuvre, voire entre le texte ancien apparemment figuré et tel autre, le cas échéant d’un auteur cette fois moderne. Une telle conception de sa pratique culmine dans le recours à un dispositif tout aussi ignoré de la critique, alors qu’il apparaît on ne peut plus caractéristique de l’art de Poussin : l’équivoque visuelle. Nous y percevons en dernier recours l’héritage du tableau à énigme cher aux collèges jésuites, et par là l’une des nombreuses marques que contient son oeuvre de la culture propre aux membres de la Compagnie. / « Read the story and the painting »: this invitation, sent by Poussin to one of his patrons, grounds the iconological approach of his works. The artist asserted elsewhere that « newness in painting does not consist mostly in a yet unrepresented subject, but in a proper and new dispositio and elocutio, thus turning the common and the old into the singular and new ». Still, little sustained critical attention has been paid to the actual ways in which Poussin made use and transposed the Ancient authors from which this erudite painter drew a large of share of his inspiration. We have therefore tried to recover what, according to Poussin himself, constitutes the newness, the singularity of his way of transposing the literary material. It appears that, rather than producing an illustration, Poussin’s word relied on a hermeneutic mode of engagement, calling upon the viewer to decipher in the paintings the secret relationships drawn between a plurality of a literary work’s loci, or between the Ancient source text ostensibly figured in the painting and another, eventually modern one. Such a conception of his practice is epitomized in Poussin’s characteristic use of a critically neglected device : the visual equivoque. We mayrecognize in its use the trace of a genre, that of the enigma painting, dear to the culture of Jesuit colleges, and anothermark of their influence on Poussin’s oeuvre.

My dissertation focuses on the moral philosophy of Descartes, Pascal, and Spinoza in the context of the revival of Stoicism within the seventeenth century. There are many misinterpretations about early modern ethical theories due to a lack of proper awareness of Stoicism in the early modern period. My project rectifies this by highlighting understated Stoic themes in these early modern texts that offer new clarity to their morality. Although these three philosophers hold very different metaphysical commitments, each embraces a different aspect of Stoicism, letting it influence but not define his work. By addressing the Stoic themes on the morality of these three authors, I also hope to help better capture the intellectual climate of the time by bringing Stoic themes into the foreground. Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophy that considered the passions a sickness of the intellect and the source of all human suffering; they believed the cure was virtue, which was obtained through replacing irrational passions with rational beliefs. Stoicism had a revival in the Renaissance ushering in a wave of Neostoic authors who play an important role in shaping the intellectual landscape of the following centuries. My first two chapters discuss Descartes, who wrote a “provisional morality” early in his public life, only (as I show) to ignore the subject of ethics until near his death. In my first chapter I argue that, though many present-day scholars misread Descartes’ first ethics as part of his final ethics, this earliest “provisional morality” mimics Neostoic Skeptics such as Montaigne and is provisional because his method of doubt is also provisional. In my second chapter I show that Descartes’ late, and more developed, moral theory attempts to synthesize a variety of ancient, and seemingly contradictory, ethical traditions: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism. In many ways Descartes embraces Stoic morality, but as a mechanist he does not view passions as an intellectual sickness; rather they are a physiological event, an amoral instrument that can be used to help control one’s irrational desires. I further defend my thesis externally by showing that this is the reading supported by Descartes’ contemporaries including critics such as Leibniz and early Cartesians such as Antoine Le Grand and Pierre-Sylvain Régis My third chapter discusses Pascal, who embraces Stoicism differently. Pascal offers Stoicism as the first tier of a binary ethics: modeled after Augustine’s city of God and city of man, it is an alternative moral code for those who are ignorant of the good and true happiness. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I discuss two common misinterpretations of Spinoza’s ethics: one of them neglects the Stoic influence on his thought while the other embraces it too strongly, portraying him as an unadulterated Stoic. Although there are ways that he is more Stoic than Descartes and Pascal, such as in his panpsychism and monism, this does not extend to his morality. Rather than accepting either of the two readings, I highlight anti- Stoic themes that are also present. I conclude that if the discussion is contained to his morality, Spinoza is no more Stoic than the other Neostoics I discuss in previous chapters.

Many of Gilles Deleuze’s most celebrated arguments are developed in conversation with Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus and Epicurus. This thesis argues that ancient Stoic conceptions of causality and language and Epicurean contributions to geometry and physics are especially important to Deleuze because they significantly undergird the concepts of “event” and “problem” that characterize Deleuze’s alternative image of thought and philosophy of nature. The role of Hellenistic influences on Deleuze has been underappreciated, probably because his references are often allusive and oblique. My dissertation reconstructs and supplements Deleuze’s interpretations of these ancient Greek philosophers. I offer critical analysis and discussion of the uses to which Deleuze is trying to put them, as well as evaluations of Deleuze’s readings in light of contemporary scholarship on Greek philosophy. Specifically, I defend Deleuze’s claim that the theory of events in The Logic of Sense is derived in large part from the ancient Stoics. Despite being supplemented by a healthy dose of twentieth-century structuralism, Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics is not indefensible, especially his interpretation of incorporeal lekta as events linked by relationships of compatibility and incompatibility independent of conceptual entailment or physical causality. I also offer an entirely new evaluation of Deleuze's polemic with Aristotle’s conception of difference. The correct understanding of Deleuze’s position has been obscured by his apparent conflation of the Aristotelian concepts of homonymy and analogy. What might otherwise seem to be a misreading of Aristotle should be read as part of an incompletely realized argument to the effect that Aristotle’s account of the core-dependent homonymy of being fails. Finally I explicate Deleuze's contention that Epicurean atomism is a “problematic Idea,” which is derived from a careful but almost entirely implicit reading of both Epicurus and Lucretius. Deleuze reads the Epicurean “swerve” as a mechanism for the self-determination of physical systems, which models the capacity of problematic ideas to provoke new lines of reasoning and alternative forms of thought. The influence of Epicureanism and Stoicism on Deleuze’s late work on meta-philosophy in What is Philosophy? accounts for the way it treats the images of nature and of thought as inextricably linked. Deleuze understands the ambition to give a joint account of nature and thought to be typical of Hellenistic philosophy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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In the following thesis, I argue that to contextualize Machiavelli’s republican thought in his Italian humanist heritage permits us to understand how Machiavelli reaches back not only to an Italian pre-humanist inheritance of liberty as freedom from servitude, but to a Stoic conception of agency which he inherits and shapes in that concept of liberty. While my analysis of Machiavelli and his humanist heritage is in fundamental agreement with that of Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, it develops however the implications of two theses that Paul O. Kristeller outlines in his works on Italian humanism: the eclectic nature of humanist ideas and their rhetorical focus. From this I draw a slightly different picture of the humanist heritage and its polemics with Augustine, and from these an understanding about Stoic agency and how it is inherited and shaped in Machiavelli’s conception of the citizen and civic duties.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Comment les Stoïciens concilient-ils l’exigence d’une piété intérieure, reposant sur l’obéissance à un dieu rationnel avec la défense des rites traditionnels ? Après avoir étudié les oscillations constantes chez les Stoïciens grecs entre la légitimation et la condamnation des cultes civils, nous montrons que les Stoïciens impériaux, Cornutus, Perse, Épictète et Marc- Aurèle, prolongent le débat sur la relation entre philosophie et religion sous une perspective différente, en l’acclimatant au contexte politico-religieux de la Rome impériale et en l’adaptant à la nature du destinataire et aux stratégies persuasives de chaque œuvre. / How can the stoics reconcile the research of rational piety based on moral perfection with the legitimization of the ritualism and traditional representation of pagan gods? After studying the constant oscillation between the legitimization and condemnation of traditional rites in ancient stoicism, we demonstrate that the roman stoics, Cornutus, Persius, Epictectus and Marcus Aurelius, address the same question, but with two essential specifics : adapting it to the political-religious context of Imperial Rome and paying particular attention to their readers as to the pedagogic strategist to grant its moral conversion.

The classification of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a spiritual exercise by Pierre Hadot has been widely accepted and exerts a strong influence on any interpretation of the text. However, such genre categorization is by itself an interpretative choice excluding other possible readings. The present thesis offers a new reading of the Meditations based on Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of stoicism and on his philosophy of event. This reading avoids any genre classification and focuses instead on the text itself by analyzing the changes of linguistic person. The Deleuzian interpretation of linguistic person and his concept of event allow for explanation of this particular feature of the Meditations and thus for addressing the problem of person and individual in stoic philosophy. Furthermore, the Deleuzian framework makes it possible to explore significant, but up to now marginalized themes recurring in the text that are directly linked to the problem of individuation - non-tragic theatre and death.

Cette thèse étudie la réception de la philosophie de Platon à Rome au cours du premier siècle av. J.-C., en s´attachant plus particulièrement à la façon dont Marco Tulio Cicéron interprète, étudie, traduit et imite l´œuvre du philosophe grec. Nous y analysons également la réception qu´en font les stoïciens étant donné que le platonisme romain et plus concrètement celui que Cicéron connait, est tributaire des enseignements des maîtres stoïciens de Rome.Cette réception sera le point de départ pour comprendre comment Cicéron imite et émule le style et le contenu des dialogues de Platon et cela afin de rendre compte des différences et des similitudes entre leurs doctrines philosophiques. Cette thèse permettra de révéler l´influence que la philosophie de Platon a eu sur la configuration de la pensée et du langage philosophique à Rome ainsi que sur celle du domaine religieux et de celui de la législation romaine.Le De Legibus de Marco Tulio Cicéron sera l´œuvre-pivot de notre recherche. Ce dialogue n´a pas été exclusivement rédigé en tant qu´une imitation du style et du contenu des Lois de Platon; en effet, son contenu reflète non seulement l´importance qu´a eu le dialogue platonicien en tant que modèle dans l´élaboration des dialogues philosophiques de Cicéron, mais plus exactement celle de sa perspective politique et philosophique telle qu´elle est exposée dans le De Oratore, De Re Publica et le De Legibus.C´est à partir du langage que nous aborderons le processus d´imitation et d´émulation, c´est-à-dire que dans un premier temps, nous analyserons la façon dont Cicéron traduit l´œuvre de Platon. Nous observerons ensuite comment Cicéron adopte la structure rhétorique du dialogue platonicien. Finalement, nous présenterons la notion de loi naturelle comme élément grâce auquel nous montrerons l´empreinte du platonisme contenu dans le De Legibus. Il est pertinent de souligner que ce platonisme cicéronien a été marqué par un dialogue constant entre les différentes traditions stoïciennes, académiciennes et péripatéticiennes tout autant que par les disputes contre les épicuriens et les griefs nourris par une réalité romaine déchirée par une crise politique et spirituelle. / The following dissertation examines the reception of Plato’s philosophy in Rome, with special focus on how Marcus Tullius Cicero, between the years I to C. approximately, receives, studies, translates and imitates the work of the Greek philosopher. Furthermore, it analyses the way in which the Stoics received Plato’s philosophy, considering the fact that Roman Platonism, and that of Cicero in particular, was communicated by the Stoic teachers of Rome.This reception will be the starting point in order to comprehend Cicero’s imitation and emulation of the style andcontent in the dialogues of Plato, and to perceive similarities as well as dissimilarities in his philosophic doctrines. This dissertation will highlight the influence that Plato’s philosophy exerted on the development of the thoughts and philosophic language of Rome, as well as its contribution to Roman religion and legislation.The point of reference for this paper is the De Legibus by Marcus Tullius Cicero. The dialogue was not composedexclusively as an imitation of the style and content of Plato’s The Laws; instead, it reflects the importance of the Platonic dialogue as a model for the philosophic dialogues which Cicero formed, specifically the political and philosophical proposition that Cicero presents in De Oratore, De Re Publica and De Legibus.The process of imitation and emulation will be addressed from a linguistic perspective. In other words, an analysis ofhow Cicero translates the work of Plato will be followed by an observation of how Cicero adapts the rhetorical structure of the Platonic dialogue. Finally, the paper will discuss the notion of the natural law as an element through which it is possible to demonstrate the Platonism that encompasses Cicero’s De Legibus. It is also worth mentioning that Cicero’s Platonism was characterized by the continuous interchange with the various Stoic, Academics and Peripatetic traditions, the disputes with Epicureans, and the objections of a Roman society immersed in a political and spiritual crisis.