Foreword: Legislation and Lawgiving: Philosophical Perspectives on Antiquity

Abstract

In June 2019 – a not so distant past when scholars from all over the world could still come together and spend three days in the same room exchanging exciting views on difficult ancient texts – Melissa Lane (Princeton University) and I, Dimitri El Murr, assisted by two of our doctoral students, Anthony Bonnemaison and René de Nicolay, organized a conference at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris entitled ‘Legislation and lawgiving: philosophical perspectives on Antiquity’. Our aim with this conference was to offer new philosophical perspectives on law giving (the issuing or writing of real or imagined constitutions for specific peoples) and more generally on legislation in classical antiquity; but we also sought to cover as much historical ground as possible, taking into account a wide range of philosophical traditions, from the Presocratics to Hellenistic philosophers and late Neoplatonists, with a special focus on the different conceptions these traditions develop of the legislator, from a critical as well as a positive point of view. The first drafts of the thirteen papers included in this volume were presented and discussed in Paris, and comments were sent to authors on the final drafts by Anthony Bonnemaison, René de Nicolay and myself.