The article attempts to show that the Italian philosophy of “dialogue” (Guido Calogero, Aldo Testa) from the 1950s and the 1960s is not a “philosophy of dialogue”, understood as “New Thinking”, as a radical abandonment of the Cartesian egological perspective. The reception of that “New Thinking” of the 1920s (mainly: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig) in Italy is significantly belated and essentially consists of simplifications and overlooks that we are dealing with a radically new thinking paradigm. Italian philosophers, (...) as they themselves define it, went “their own way”. It means, however, that they have not at all opened themselves to the authentic philosophy of dialogue. (shrink)

For more than forty years, Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's most important and influential philosophers, has been a leading participant in the postwar turn that has brought Nietzsche back to the center of philosophical enquiry. In this collection of his essays on the subject, which is a dialogue both with Nietzsche and with the Nietzschean tradition, Vattimo explores the German philosopher's most important works and discusses his views on the _Ubermensch_, time, history, truth, hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. He also presents (...) a different, more "Italian" Nietzsche, one that diverges from German and French characterizations. Many contemporary French and poststructuralist philosophers offer literary or aesthetic readings of Nietzsche's work that downplay its political import. Shaped by the revolutionary tradition of 1968, Vattimo's interpretations take Nietzsche seriously as a political philosopher and argue for and defend his relevance to projects for social and political change. He emphasizes the hermeneutic aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, characterizing the Nietzschean project as a political hermeneutics. Vattimo also grapples with Heidegger, a philosopher who has had a profound influence on the interpretation and understanding of Nietzsche. Vattimo examines Heidegger's philosophy through its complex relationship to Nietzsche's, and he produces a Heideggerian understanding of Nietzsche that paradoxically goes against Heidegger's own readings of Nietzsche's work. Heidegger believed Nietzsche was the ultimate metaphysician; Vattimo sees him as the founder of postmetaphysical philosophy. Throughout these essays, Vattimo draws on and quotes extensively from fragments in Nietzsche's notebooks, many of which have never before been translated into English. His writing is clear, elegant, and accessible, and, for the first time, Vattimo's own intellectual developments, shifts, and continuities can be clearly discerned. The loyal testimony and unique perspective in _Dialogue with Nietzsche_ makes a convincing case for another orientation in Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

The Italian-born Lanfranc of Pavia and his more illustrious pupil and compatriot Anselm of Bec have long been considered pivotal figures in the theological and especially philosophical developments of the late eleventh century. Long ago dubbed the “father of Scholasticism” on account of his attempts to harmonize reason and faith, Anselm has occasioned increasing scrutiny in recent years as scholars have begun to target the cultural and pedagogical role of Anselm and his milieu in the early stages of the (...) twelfth-century renaissance. In a particularly stimulating interdisciplinary exploration of the cognitive relation between builders and their craft and masters and theirs, Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark have advanced an intriguing model suggesting that theologians and Romanesque builders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were part of a larger transformative development in which thinkers and artisans developed new methods for solving new problems; these new methods, in turn, transformed practitioners of a craft into members of new and distinct disciplines. The verdict is still out on the precise nature of those important developments, but especially vexing is the question of the abbey of Bec's importance and influence under Lanfranc and Anselm during these changing times. As a leading scholar of Anselm has recently put it, “The character of the school of Bec emerges as a riddle to be solved. What was its focus, what did its teachers teach, and how long did it last?” Recent studies have modified Richard Southern's portrayal of the curriculum of Anselm's school at Bec as largely devoted to monastic ideals and demonstrated that history and law were also studied, that a good number of students went on to become able administrators, and that Anselm may have unwittingly contributed to the rise of courtly love. Much of the fog surrounding the authorial publication and dissemination of Anselm's writings has recently been cleared by Richard Sharpe's meticulous analysis in “Anselm as Author,” revealing a careful and more deliberate editorial planning on Anselm's part than previously recognized. However, even amidst the gathering attention directed toward these figures and their cultural context, it is the most basic and obvious feature of Lanfranc's and Anselm's written record that has been the most undeservedly neglected: their use of dialogue and its correlation to the early development of Scholastic disputation. To be sure, the revival of dialectic in the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth has long been known and rather well charted, particularly with regard to the growth of theology as an academic discipline. What follows is a somewhat more focused line of inquiry. Looking beyond the well-trodden ground of Anselm's philosophy and theology and instead examining his pedagogical innovations, this essay explores Anselm's contribution to the development of literary dialogue and to the origins of the Scholastic disputatio, both valuable tools indeed in his philosophical and theological endeavors. Anselm's influence as a prolific author of dialogues can especially be observed in a younger generation of writers and thinkers who studied with him or directly sought to imitate his style and whose oeuvres need also to be considered. By examining the circle of Lanfranc and Anselm, the methods embodied by their teachings, and the writings they produced, this essay aims to show that the Scholastic dialectical methods, later so prominent in medieval universities, have their origins within the general milieu of monastic learning. More specifically, these methods will be shown to have their origins in Lanfranc's and Anselm's engagement with dialogue and disputation at the school of Bec. (shrink)

Translated by Bencivenga from the original Italian of his philosophical best-seller, this dialogue provides a comprehensive statement on the role of freedom in the realms of morality, psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Taking as his motto Galileo's claim in Dialogues in the Great World Systems that "every small connection should be worth introducing with almost as much liberty as if we were telling stories," Bencivenga lets his four characters embrace a wide range of topics in their eclectic discussion. A guide, (...) a libertarian, a determinist, and an open-minded intellectual (who seeks only to understand the strengths of various positions) offer thoughtful considerations of quantum physics and deconstruction, the Gothic novel and detective stories, the structure of desire and the mathematics of infinity, penetrating comments on Freud, Raymond Chandler, and Wertverlaufe, and a reasonable explanation of why Kant's first Critique is longer than either the second or third. What results is less a systematic account than a composite picture for the student of philosophy to piece together. (shrink)

This original cross-disciplinary work examines the crucial role of dialogue in philosophy from the oral dialogues of Socrates; through the written dialogues of Plato, Cicero, Lucian, Valla, Hume, and Heidegger; to the present ubiquitous form of dialogue on the Internet. Geoffrey Rockwell's main point is that in dialogue, be it oral, written, or electronic, there is a common mode of persuasion at work. The dialogue is an orchestrated event meant to be overheard. While the author is absent, the readers of (...) the dialogue are in a sense present as eavesdroppers on a conversation scripted to encourage them to judge between the characters and the philosophical positions they represent. Relying heavily on Italian Renaissance theories of dialogue, Rockwell builds on Sperone Speroni's comparison of dialogue to comedy in which there is a mixture of voices, each with its own form and content. He then looks to the essays of M. M. Bakhtin to propose a working definition of dialogue as a unity of diverse voices. Dialogue is many things, but it is principally about the culture of thoughtful conversation. It is a genre suited to presenting how people discuss ideas, how positions are related to character, and surveying positions that can be taken on a subject. In a world increasingly connected by the Internet, there is no more appropriate genre for study. (shrink)

For more than forty years, Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's most important and influential philosophers, has been a leading participant in the postwar turn that has brought Nietzsche back to the center of philosophical enquiry. In this collection of his essays on the subject, which is a dialogue both with Nietzsche and with the Nietzschean tradition, Vattimo explores the German philosopher's most important works and discusses his views on the _Ubermensch_, time, history, truth, hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. He also presents (...) a different, more "Italian" Nietzsche, one that diverges from German and French characterizations. Many contemporary French and poststructuralist philosophers offer literary or aesthetic readings of Nietzsche's work that downplay its political import. Shaped by the revolutionary tradition of 1968, Vattimo's interpretations take Nietzsche seriously as a political philosopher and argue for and defend his relevance to projects for social and political change. He emphasizes the hermeneutic aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, characterizing the Nietzschean project as a political hermeneutics. Vattimo also grapples with Heidegger, a philosopher who has had a profound influence on the interpretation and understanding of Nietzsche. Vattimo examines Heidegger's philosophy through its complex relationship to Nietzsche's, and he produces a Heideggerian understanding of Nietzsche that paradoxically goes against Heidegger's own readings of Nietzsche's work. Heidegger believed Nietzsche was the ultimate metaphysician; Vattimo sees him as the founder of postmetaphysical philosophy. Throughout these essays, Vattimo draws on and quotes extensively from fragments in Nietzsche's notebooks, many of which have never before been translated into English. His writing is clear, elegant, and accessible, and, for the first time, Vattimo's own intellectual developments, shifts, and continuities can be clearly discerned. The loyal testimony and unique perspective in _Dialogue with Nietzsche_ makes a convincing case for another orientation in Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

Pope Gregory I, commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where (...) the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives, and local communities. My aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further development. (shrink)

This article proposes a model for route description dialogues based on the integration of the theories about route directions with those related to specific spatial instructions. This proposal is based empirically on a corpus of spoken Italian. The analysis of the corpus has shown that the basic dialogue strategy proposed by previous researchers requires further integration and elaboration. Also the model of spatial language developed in cognitive linguistics applies to the description of the giver's instructions and directions, despite the (...) fact that the literature in the field often overlooks this approach. This way of accounting for route descriptions is suitable to explain the lexicalization of the conceptualization of the displacements the follower must accomplish. A model of dialogue partitions integrated with the cognitive modelling of spatial language is proposed and supported by examples from the linguistic data. (shrink)

This research project analyzes a strategy for teaching philosophy in secondary school inspired by Socratic dialogue, which aims at the creation and effective management of cognitive dissonance as a tool for promoting critical thinking, called Socratic Challenge (SC). The research originates from workshops held in the years 2016/2019 in a technical and vocational institute in the province of Varese, in which I participated as the creator and conductor, involving the voluntary participation of about 150 students. The research questions are: What (...) are the characteristics of the Socratic Challenge? Can it constitute a teaching methodology to be proposed? Under what conditions? Within what project framework? The empirical research is qualitative, naturalistic, and exploratory (Lumbelli, 1984), specifically a self-study (Hamilton & Pinnegar 2009), divided into two phases. In the first phase, data regarding motivation and perceptions of training impact were collected through in-depth interviews of students (16) and analyzed using the criteria of reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2019). In the second phase, the workshops were repeated remotely in technical and vocational institutes in Milan and the province, involving 113 students who were surveyed with a qualitative questionnaire. The workshops were recorded and the discussion interactions were analyzed according to a qualitative inductive approach that refers to Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006). Results show how this dialogical instructional strategy in philosophy teaching can be considered an effective alternative to the historical-philosophical approach predominant in the Italian tradition (Illetterati 2007). (shrink)

First published in 1990, Border Dialogues explores some of the territories of contemporary culture, philosophy and criticism. It touches on arguments surrounding Nietzsche and Italian 'weak thought', the mysteries of being 'British', and with more immediate concerns such as computers, fashion, gender and ethnicity. The chapters explore how such different strands are joined together, and how this can lead to a reassessment of contemporary cultural criticism. This innovative and interesting reissue will be of particular interest to students of critical (...) theory, cultural studies, radical philosophy and deconstruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, and: The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and PalamasDavid BradshawSaint Gregory Palamas. Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite. Translated by Rein Ferweda with Introduction by Sara J. Denning-Bolle. Binghamton, NY: Global Publications/CEMERS, 1999. Pp. 108. Paper, $17.00.A. N. Williams. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 222. Cloth, (...) $49.95.Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) was a Byzantine monk who rose to become Archbishop of Thessalonica and a leading theologian of the Orthodox Church. He is best known for his role in the hesychast controversy. The hesychasts (from hesychia, silence) were monks of Mount Athos who claimed that through prayer and ascetic struggle they had been enabled to see God with their bodily eyes. More precisely, they claimed to see a kind of divine radiance permeating all things, including their own bodies. They insisted that this light was not a created reality but was God himself as he manifested himself to them.When the hesychasts were attacked by an Italian monk named Barlaam, Palamas rose to their defense. The challenge he faced was that of explaining how the transcendent God could be visible to human eyes. His answer was to adapt two terms long in use in other areas of theology, ousia (substance, essence) and energeia (activity, operation). He held that whereas the ousia of God is unknowable to any created intellect, the divine energeiai can be shared in by creatures, who are thereby deified. The "uncreated light" of the monks is simply the divine energeia as it had become visible to the monks through the purification of the heart achieved by prayer, asceticism, and obedience to the divine commandments. Gregory's defense of the hesychasts was endorsed by a series of synods at Constantinople, and to this day he is commemorated in Orthodox churches on the second Sunday in Lent.The importance of Palamas for the history of philosophy lies in the fact that he presents a version of Christian thought that is deeply rooted in tradition, and by most standards fully orthodox, yet owes nothing to western scholasticism. A quick comparison [End Page 586] with Aquinas reveals several points of divergence. (1) Whereas Aquinas holds that all the divine attributes and activities are identical with the divine essence, the distinctions among them being merely quoad nos, Palamas holds that the distinction between the divine ousia and energeia is not just imposed by our perspective but is truly present in God. (2) Whereas Aquinas says little about deification and explicitly reserves the vision of the divine essence to the afterlife, Palamas insists that deification is possible in this life and that the condition of those who experience it is similar (though of course not identical) to that of the blessed after the resurrection. (3) Whereas Aquinas allows that the blessed ultimately do attain a vision of the divine essence, Palamas holds that the divine ousia is intrinsically unknowable to creatures.Whether these differences are as sharp as they seem is a matter that requires careful investigation. The first of the two works under review, Palamas's Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, is to be welcomed for the clarification it provides of Palamas's views. It is the third of his major works to be translated into English, the others being Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. I confess to finding it less engaging than the other two; it lacks the freshness and vigor of the Triads (Palamas's earliest work) and the wide-ranging systematic character of the Chapters. Nonetheless, it does provide a helpful elaboration of the ousia -energeia distinction, particularly in the argument (88-90) that such a distinction does not compromise divine simplicity.The second work, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas by A. N. Williams, is the first book-length comparison of these two pivotal figures. It is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, and has a certain plodding dryness characteristic of the genre; nonetheless, it is clear and well-informed, and Williams is... (shrink)

The original Italian text has been reproduced in the back of the volume.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants-Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert-were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was both a participant and increasingly a subject of controversy. The discussion centered upon three different events occurring roughly simultaneously. The first was Rameau's formulation of the principle of the fundamental bass, which explained the structure of chords and their progression. (...) The second was the writing of the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, with articles on music by Rousseau. The third was the "Querelle des Bouffons," over the relative merits of Italian comic opera and French tragic opera. The philosophes, in the typical manner of Enlightenment thinkers, were able to move freely from the broad issues of philosophy and criticism, to the more technical questions of music theory, considering music as both art and science. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness and dealt with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of Music and the French Enlightenment, Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published. Stressing the importance of seeing the philosophes' writings in context of a dynamic dialogue, Verba carefully reconstructs the chain of arguments and rebuttals across which Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot formulated their own evolving positions. A section of key passages in translation presents several texts in English for the first time, recapturing the tenor and tone of the dialogue at hand. In a new epilogue, Verba discusses important trends in new scholarship, tracing how scholars continue to grapple with many of the same fundamental oppositions and competing ideas that were debated by the philosophes in the French Enlightenment. (shrink)

While Cusanus’ literary sources for his engagement with Islam have been closely studied, questions about possible personal encounters with Muslims, and the role of non-literary sources in developing his concept of interreligious dialogue, remain largely unaddressed. This paper presents original archival research to identify the only person whom Cusanus mentions in the Cribratio Alkorani by name as an oral source about Muslim beliefs – an Italian merchant active in Constantinople at the time of Cusanus’ visit in 1437. In doing (...) so, it casts new light on Cusanus’ treatises on Islam and on his interaction with Muslims. (shrink)

Although Leonardo Bruni's Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum have long occupied a central place in the study of Italian Renaissance humanism, scholarly interpretations of them differ markedly. Such differences attest to the formal complexity of this text, the uncertainty about its date of composition, and the obvious contradictions between the arguments offered at different times by its main interlocutor. This essay first briefly describes the scholarly debates that have surrounded Bruni's Dialogues, particularly as these illustrate competing definitions of Florentine (...) humanism. I then argue that the text juxtaposes citation to chronological narration as it explores one central theme in Bruni's humanism, how best to represent the past in and for the present. (shrink)

The tradition of Italian Thought – not the political one but the poetic and naturalistic one – finds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a way to enter into the new century, the century of immanence and animality. In fact, Deleuze himself remained outside the main philosophical traditions of his own time. The tradition to which Deleuze refers is the one that begins with Spinoza and ends with Nietzsche. It is an ontological tradition, which deals mainly with life and (...) the world rather than with the human subject and knowledge. Finally, the text sketches a possible dialogue between Deleuze and the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most important figures of Italian Thought. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to briefly reconstruct the reception of Dewey's _Art as Experience_ and more generally of his aesthetics in Italy. In order to do so, my contribution will be divided into three parts, corresponding to the three editions that Dewey's book has had in Italy. In the first part, I will trace the early influences and the debate with Benedetto Croce, showing the "idealistic encirclement" suffered by Dewey's aesthetics, which led to the first Italian translation (...) of Dewey's book in 1951. In the second part, I will trace the influence of Dewey's aesthetics from 1951 to 2006, showing first the Marxist and Catholic critiques, then the first tentative attempts at a reinterpretation outside the idealist domain, and finally the second edition of _Art as Experience_ in Italy 1995. The third part considers the renaissance of Dewey's aesthetics in Italy after Giovanni Matteucci's new translation in 2006 and Luigi Russo's work in 2007. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Dewey's significance for the contemporary Italian aesthetic debate and an attempt to identify a specific Italian interpretation of Dewey's aesthetics that can be traced in the effort to bring Dewey into dialogue with other authors of the modern aesthetic tradition. (shrink)

"Plato in the Italian Renaissance, the first book-length treatment of Renaissance Platonism in over fifty years, is a study of the dramatic revival of interest in the Platonic dialogues in Italy in the fifteenth century. Through a richly contextual study of the translations and commentaries on Plato, James Hankins seeks to show how the interpretation of Plato was molded by the expectations of fifteenth-century readers, by the need to protect Plato against his critics, and the broader hermeneutical assumptions and (...) practices of the period. (shrink)

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in which two influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito's theory, the article lays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racial difference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life. However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘flesh without body’, (...) Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach, in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. The second part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relations between primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derived an alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact. (shrink)

Highlights and critically assesses the work of contemporary Italian political philosophers. Italy has a rich philosophical legacy, and recent developments and movements in its political philosophy have produced a significant body of thought by internationally renowned philosophers working on questions and themes such as the critique of neoliberalism, statehood, politics and culture, feminism, community, the stranger, and the relationship between politics and action. This volume brings this conversation to English-language readers, considering well-known Italian philosophers such as Vattimo, Agamben, (...) Esposito, and Negri, as well as philosophers with whom English-language readers are less acquainted, such as Luce Fabbri, Adriana Cavarero, and Lea Melandri. In addition, the essays extend the conversation beyond the realm of Italian philosophy, bringing its thinkers into dialogue with philosophical figures including Badiou, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano. (shrink)

The gradual secularization of European society and culture is often said to characterize the development of the modern world, and the early Italian humanists played a pioneering role in this process. Here Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, have edited and translated seven primary texts that shed important light on the subject of "civic humanism" in the Renaissance.Included is a treatise of Francesco Petrarca on government, two representative letters from Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni's panegyric (...) to Florence, Francesco Barbaro's letter on "wifely" duty, Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue on avarice, and Angelo Poliziano's vivid history of the Pazzi conspiracy. Each translation is prefaced by an essay on the author and a short bibliography. The substantial introductory essay offers a concise, balanced summary of the historiographcal issues connected with the period. (shrink)

This collectively written article aims to offer a bird's eye view of the Italian debates about precarity in employment and life, as captured in discussions among participants in a focus group held in Milan in 2006. The chief topics that emerged from this discussion include the feminization of labour, feminist practices and methodologies, representation/participation, and guaranteed income. Here, we give as much space as possible to the diverse voices of participants and their strategies for transformation.

The ideas of Plato (429-347 BC) have exerted such an abiding influence on western philosophy and political thought that it is easy to forget that for many centuries, between about 500 and 1400, his works were almost unknown in western Europe. This was partly because very few people in Medieval Europe knew enough Greek to read Plato and even if they had, copies of the Dialogues were almost impossible to obtain, with only the Timaeus available in Latin translation. Scholars were (...) therefore largely dependent on earlier Latin authors such as Cicero and St Augustine for a second-hand knowledge of Plato's ideas. It was the rediscovery of the Dialogues in the original during the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century that set western thought off on new paths, a rediscovery that was made possible by the preservation and transmission of Plato's work by scholars in Byzantium. (shrink)

This essay reflects on Anglo-American literary representations of Italian culture from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Throughout history, many national and cultural entities have defined themselves in relation to foreign and “exotic” civilizations; this equally applies to “the exotic within Europe.” Through a discussion of the works of writers as various as E.M. Forster (The Story of a Panic, 1903), Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun, 1997), and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love, 2006), the essay describes a tradition that (...) celebrates Italy as an authentic cultural experience and at the same time “orientalises” such a tradition by depicting it as a destabilizing threat and challenge to the “rational mind,” allegedly represented by Anglo-American culture. The essay attempts to disclose the degree of “imagined identity” that emerges from an on-going productive dialogue with the “other within oneself.”. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give (...) an international audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

Religious actors are often called to take an active part in initiatives promotedby European Institutions because of their potential to prevent conflict and ease socialtensions that can arise among people of different religions. Member States are called tosupport a sustained, open and transparent dialogue with the different religions communitiesas a tool for peacekeeping and promoting social cohesion in Europe and at its borders.The role of local authorities is crucial in this process; virtuous cases are the Italianmunicipalities of Novellara and Reggio (...) Emilia, whose abilities to value the presence ofSikh and Hindu communities in their territories led to the publication of a Handbook forLocal Authorities, titled “Valuing religious communities as key actors of social cohesion”,with the patronage of the Council of Europe: an example of how local best practices caninfluence European principles from the bottom up. The paper aims to explore in detail thedifferent ways in which these religious actors and local governments collaborate and cooperate:the enhancement of places of worship, the promotion of interfaith dialogue andthe shared participation in religious festivities. These are policy strategies aimed towardsa collective education for plural and inclusive citizenship. (shrink)

Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

This article describes the political practices of a part of the Italian women’s movement that, as of the 1980s, gave way to the sexual difference thought. Through a political analysis of their own experience, which removed any humanist identity assumptions, the women’s movement generated new practices and discourses. With these, women were able to exert self-criticism, and simultaneously to produce new subjectivities articulated around the sexual difference concept. The difference thought helped highlight the limits of institutional policy, renewing the (...) premises of political analysis and redefining the borders of what was deemed to be ‘political’. Intended to foster dialogue with other feminist proposals, the article underlines the situated nature of this political experience and focuses on the method, the political praxis and the process rather than the outcome, the conclusions or the theory. (shrink)

The meaning of the term "baroque" has been the subject of much debate. In the field of historiography, historians have not engaged in a dialogue on the subject and have accepted uncritically the value-judgments of eighteenth-century scholarship. One approach to be used in this author's new book, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, compares the work of 782 Italian historians from earliest times through the seventeenth century. The humanist historiography of the Italian Renaissance exhibited the concepts (...) of change, contingency, and epoch in history; relied on ancient forms; used methodological principles of causation; and taught moral and political lessons. Italian Baroque historiography, on the other hand, employed the forms of the new bulletins or avvisi, copied the prose style of its contemporaries, discounted its practical utility, and displayed a separation between history as literature and history as research. (shrink)

The paper relates to the actual extent of the “margin of appreciation” of national law-making power in Europe when it takes ethical issues into consideration. This occurs when the use of technoscience may affect fundamental interests. The discretion of the legislature is limited, particularly by the transnational system arising from the European legal integration within both the European Union and the Council of Europe. The two schemes of integration, although there are differences between them, converge to put national legislation under (...) pressure, particularly when it considers ethical matters. As a matter of fact, ethical issues cannot be approached at the national level alone but must be addressed at least at the continental level. An important role in the work of shaping the ethical rules from a continental perspective is played not by the national legislatures, but by the dialogue between the different levels of the judiciary. This role is inescapable and cannot be replaced by legislation, even if it is approved in a transnational plan. The function of the case law in regulating phenomena with ethical implications is studied, taking into consideration the case of Italian Law no. 40 of 2004 concerning medically assisted reproduction. Over the last 15 years, this law, which is inconsistent with many fundamental ethical principles, but has not been amended by the legislature, has been in the process of being corrected by the dialogue between European and national case law. (shrink)

The paper wishes to analyse the religious buildings, with special attention to the Christianones, considering their transformation due to liturgical and religious reasons. The aim of theresearch relates to the needs of restoration and conservation of the buildings. The restorationand conservation work compels the understanding of all the historical construction phases of thebuilding itself, and the reasons for them, in order to plan a good project, able to respect their real“authenticity”, according to the Nara charter, established by ICOMOS (International Council (...) ofMonuments and Sites) in 1994. The Nara document is inspired by the Venice Charter, approved in1964 and adopted by ICOMOS in 1965, where, in chapter 3, is stated that: “The intention in conservingand restoring monuments is to safeguard them no less as works of art than as historical evidence.”Restoration refers to the conservation of the historical evidence plus the historical meaningof the building. The traces, even if hidden, of the past, related to different conceiving of the building,must be transferred to the future and made available and comprehensible for everyone. The valorisationof the building, as it is defined by the Italian law of 2004 is a tool for the dissemination ofculture, because the culture must be accessible to everyone. The religion and the places devoted tosharing spiritual values, in any geographical and political position and at any time, focusing onintercultural dialogue in a peaceful environment, must be accepted and the work of restorationmust be connected with the transformation in order to ensure the respect of the cultural values ofreligious places. Starting from the re-transformation of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, from Museum toMosque and the reception of the transformation from the history and history of art internationalenvironment, the paper has the intention to offer an overview, through different examples relatedto diverse times and places, of the role of the religion and liturgy in the transformation of the houseof god and the connection with the cultural environment considering that the transformation hasa strong connection with the restoration activities both on the decorative elements and spatialdimension of the religious buildings and their environment. (shrink)

This paper dialogues with the contributions included in Francesco Fiorentino and Domenico Firomonte’s edited volumes and Massimo Riva’s book from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. This diverse positioning in relation to the work of women writers has allowed feminist criticism to develop a path that has deconstructed the Italian literary canon and the promotion of critical stances that are no longer abstract or monologic, but rather situated in the point of view of the subject and its (...) relational component. Works by Italian women writers present themselves as a body of texts of high material density that transfer questions of textual mobility both within digital and print culture onto the subject and its style of enunciation. L’intervento dialoga con i contributi dei volumi a cura di Francesco Fiorentino e Domenico Fiormonte e con il libro di Massimo Riva a partire dall’esperienza della critica letteraria femminista italiana. Il suo diverso posizionamento rispetto alle opere delle scrittrici ha permesso l’articolarsi di un percorso che ha decostruito il canone della tradizione letteraria italiana e l’affermarsi di posizioni critiche non più astratte e monologiche, ma situate a partire dal soggetto e dalla sua componente relazionale. Le opere delle scrittrici italiane si rappresentano infatti come un corpo testuale dall’alta densità materica, che sposta sul soggetto e sul suo stile dell’enunciazione le questioni di mobilità del testo, sia esso virtuale o cartaceo. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the variety of sophistic argumentations that the Paduan philosopher and writer Sperone Speroni (1500-1588) applies in the so-called paradoxical work Dialogo della Discordia (1542), in which style as well as content factor into the author’s interest in ancient sophistic rhetoric. In analyzing the subject, the paper focuses on the influence of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511) in Speroni’s dialogue. In so doing, the paper also intends to contribute to a deeper understanding of the impact of (...) Erasmus’ work in the Venetian area - in particular, the rebirth of ancient sophistic literature in the Italian Renaissance. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the Italian school (...) of Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality. (shrink)

In the period following the Second World War Giulio Preti was one of the leading exponents of Italian philosophy. A master of open critical thought, cultivated in the light of a rationalism that dialogued with, and integrated into his own philosophical model, many of the currents and stances of the global research scenario. Phenomenology, Marxism, pragmatism, neopositivism, transcendentalism and structuralism: in Preti all of these found an organic and original synthesis. Further, his particular brand of rationalist-critical thought touched on (...) many aspects of philosophical knowledge: theoretical philosophy, the philosophy of science, that of language and that of art, from ethics to politics and even taking in the history of philosophy, offering authoritative contributions in every sphere. One hundred years after his birth, the University of Florence and the heir to the Faculty in which he lectured at length, the Faculty of Education, has decided to honour his memory with this anthology of studies, penned by former pupils and others and also by younger scholars, to once again focus the wealth of this thought and its, in many respects, current relevance. Even now, this particular brand of open, critical rationalism can offer a benchmark for addressing the new issues for philosophical reflection thrown up by modern society and culture. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600, accused of heresy by the Inquisition. His life took him from Italy to Northern Europe and England, and finally to Venice, where he was arrested. His six dialogues in Italian, today considered a turning point towards the philosophy and science of the modern world, were written during his visit to Elizabethan London. He died refusing to recant views which he defined as philosophical rather than theological, and for which (...) he claimed liberty of expression. The papers in this volume derive from a conference commemorating the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death. Some focus on his experience in England, others on the Italian context of his thought and his impact upon others. Together they constitute a major new survey of the range of Bruno's philosophical activity, as well as evaluating his use of earlier cultural traditions and his influence on both contemporary and more modern themes and trends. (shrink)

Giacomo Leopardi, a major Italian poet of the nineteenth century, was also an expert in evil to whom Schopenhauer referred as a “spiritual brother.” Leopardi wrote: “Everything is evil. That is to say, everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil.” These and other thoughts are collected in the Zibaldone, a massive collage of heterogeneous writings published posthumously. Leopardi’s pessimism assumes a polished form (...) in his literary writings, such as Dialogue between Nature and an Islander (1824)—an invective against nature and the suffering of creatures within it. In his last lyric, Broom, or the flower of the desert (1836), Leopardi points to the redeeming power of poetry and to human solidarity as placing at least temporary limits on the scope of evil. (shrink)

Against the enthusiasm for dialogue and deliberation in recent democratic theory, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and French philosopher Jacques Rancière construct their political philosophies around the nondialogical figure of the third person. The strikingly different deployments of the figure of the third person offered by Esposito and Rancière present a crystallization of their respective approaches to political philosophy. In this essay, the divergent analyses of the third person offered by these two thinkers are considered in terms of the (...) critical strategies they employ. Contrasting Esposito’s strategy of “ethical dissensus” with Rancière’s strategy of “aesthetic dissensus,” it is argued that Esposito’s attempts to recruit the figure of the third person to dismantle the dispositif of the person are politically problematic, while Rancière’s alternative account of the third person is more promising for political theory and practice. (shrink)

The occasion for this dialogue on Elisabeth Anscombe’s legacy for twenty-first-century ethics came with the publication in Italian of the collection of her ethical writings (G. E. M. Anscombe, Scritti di etica con un saggio di Peter Geach, a cura di S. Cremaschi, Morcelliana, Brescia 2022). In addition to making Anscombe’s ethical writings accessible to the Italian public, the book brings together her contribution to practical philosophy to its full extent for the first time. Vaccarezza's essay discusses Anscombe’s (...) critique of the modern law-based view of ethics. Magri’s contribution focuses on Anscombe’s anti-anti-naturalism, aiming to unearth the twofold agenda in her project of meta-critique of modern moral philosophy. De Anna's paper sets out to examine the role of Wittgensteinian ways of thinking in Anscombe’s proposed restructuring of modern ethics. (shrink)

Luigi Pareyson is an italian existencialist philosopher, the unknown master of Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. This not very well known philosopher has a consistent anthropology, which carries out its consecuences in his aesthetics and hermeneutics. Consecuently, he also considers philosophy as a permanent dialogue between each person with truth and other persons. This is the future of philosophy, he says.

This volume presents the first Italian translation with commentary of the Doric Pseudo-Pythagorean texts, which are ascribed to Archytas and Brontinus and deal with metaphysical, logical, and epistemological questions. These texts probably date from the 1st century BCE and are the product of a re-emerging dogmatic interpretation of Plato's dialogues.

Sciacca toma a Vico como representante de la modemidad de Occidente, y va elaborando su doctrina filosófica de la integridad a través de un continuo diálogo, acerca de la dinámica y la importancia del pensamiento italiano, con sus principales intérpretes . La grandeza de Vico –más brillante si cabe entre las sombras que le rodean–, aliada a la de Rosmini, debería, según el autor, servirnos para vencer el “oscurecimiento de la inteligencia” en el que nos han hecho caer principalmente los (...) racionalismos y los nihilismos.Sciacca takes Vico as a representative of modernity in the Western culture. He aims to spell out his philosophical doctrine on the integrity through a continuous dialogue on the dynamics and the importance of the Italian thought with its more outstanding participants: Gentile and Spaventa. Vico’s greatness –still brighter among the surrounding shadows– related to Rosmini’s, should be used, according to the author, to avoid being caught by the so called “darkening of the mind” into which both rationalism and nihilism makes us so easily prone to fall. (shrink)

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Bernardo Segni (Florence, 1504 – Florence, 1588) published some Italian translations with commentaries on some works of Aristotle. He was not a scholar nor did he have a university affiliation nor could he boast a deep knowledge of Greek language, but he worked in the cultural climate of Duke of the Florentine Republic Cosimo I (Florence, 1519 – Florence, 1574) and of the Florentine Academy, whose aim was to raise the cultural centrality (...) of Florence and its dialect. In this paper I analyze some passages of his translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (Florence 1550; reprint Venice 1551). Through this examination some characteristics of the author’s work emerge, such as his didactic purposes, which may be related to the type of his audience, his (poor) knowledge of classical authors and sources, and his tendency towards continuous dialogue with the present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theory of the Apophantic Judgment According to René GirardDesiderio Parrilla Martínez (bio)introduction: criticism of judgment in rené girardIn his essay "Belief (Cultural Memory in the Present)" ("Credere di credere") Gianni Vattimo stated the conditions of possibility of a "weak and post-metaphysical Christianity" founded in René Girard´s victimary hypothesis.1 According to Vattimo, mimetic theory allows abandoning traditional metaphysics and the classical theory of truth, based on the judgment. In later (...) works, Vattimo insisted on the epistemological virtues of mimetic theory to reform the classical theory of adequacy2 and the theological implications of this reform.3 Mimetic theory definitely unmasks the violence of the "strong metaphysic," to enable the advent of a weak metaphysics and a kenotic theology based on love: "According to him, it is the survival of the victim-based mechanism, albeit in attenuated form, that explains the recurrence of violence in the history of Christianity. To complete Girard's argument, we learn from Heidegger that what Girard calls the victim-based mechanism is metaphysical objectivism."4 The Erlebnis (non-conceptualized experience) of this theological weakening [End Page 147] has occurred as an event from a previous epistemological weakening, which mimetic theory itself contributes to consolidating.5This drift toward the epistemological nihilism generated a debate between Gianni Vattimo and René Girard, who rejected this conclusion drawn from his mimetic theory.6 The transcript of this controversy first appeared in Verità o fede debole? Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo (2006) [Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith (2011)], a compilation of three dialogues on three fundamental concepts: truth, secularization, and relativism. In the first part, focused on the epistemological question of truth, Girard affirms he isn't accurately recognized in Vattimo´s thought, showing his distance and warning that, unlike the Italian thinker, his thinking is primarily realistic: "Personally, I agree with Vattimo when he says that Christianity is a revelation of love, but I do not exclude that it is also a revelation of truth. Because truth and love coincide and are one in Christianity."7 In the same chapter, Vattimo challenges René Girard for not having extracted the ultimate consequences of his mimetic theory, because he stays trapped in the realistic ontology of a pre-mimetic mentality: [Vattimo:] "In sum, the only thing I really can't go along with in Girard is his faith in the salvific power of truth, whether it be revealed or discovered by science."8However, in the controversy René Girard could not fail to recognize the central thesis of Gianni Vattimo, according to which his work involved a critique of the classical interpretation of judgment: "I think that there is some kind of incompatibility between traditional philosophy and mimetic theory. I feel, for instance, that scholars influenced by Thomism are handicapped in regard to mimetic theory, because they have to work with neatly distinguished categories. Philosophy is looking for logical foundation as well. It is difficult for philosophers to accept a mechanism that triggers opposite effects. Therefore, it always excludes the real anthropological foundation."9 René Girard acknowledges that in his eagerness to keep up the anthropo-genesis, he cannot avoid judging the theory of judgment from the mimetic theory.10 This critique appears since the beginning of his investigation in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, when Girard distinguishes between Heraclitus's logos and the logos of John's gospel.11 In Violence and the Sacred he proceeded to investigate the historical origins of both forms of logos and discovered that a hidden reality underlay the evidence of the canonical judicative structure, using the resources of Derridean deconstruction, of which Girard acknowledges his debt.12René Girard's relationship with philosophy is problematic. Mimetic theory criticizes all human cultural constructions, including mythology and philosophy. However, in The Scapegoat René Girard approaches the issue of "judgment" as a place of truth. His relationship with philosophy therefore needs to be [End Page 148] recognized and his contribution valued. In this work Girard exposed the evolution and transformations that have resulted in the classic judicative structure, showing the assumptions of the last supplement of logical truth.13 In Of Grammatology Derrida took up the term "suppl... (shrink)