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)

Italy was one of the first places outside the US to manifest an interest in pragmatism. However, the reception of Peirce has been discontinuous and asymptotic at the same time. It grew over the time getting closer and closer to a complete acknowledgement of what Peirce had really written, but there were many periods in which studies on Peirce seemed quite stuck or absent. For clarity sake I will divide this reception in three big generational waves. 1. The (...) First Wave: Leonardo The first one i... (shrink)

In this article the survival of the sapphic fragments of the ancient times in Renaissance period is examined. More specifically the reappearance of the sapphic verses is presented concerning the first publications (editio princeps) and the most widespread texts of ancient authors during West Renaissance. These texts were the primary sources, on which the later publications of the sapphic work were based, while they also had a great influence on the reception of the ancient poet by the Renaissance writers.

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)

ABSTRACT This article examines the reception of Owen's thought in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy. The articles shows that while Owen attracted the attentionof Piedmontese liberals in the early 1820s, such as Giovanni Arrivabene, and were integrated into the wider Risorgimento, they were, as the Guiseppe Manzzini's work demonstrated, eclipsed by what were considered more the immediate political objectives of the Risorgimento. Where Owen's ideas did attract widespread interest was on the question of educational reform. This was because education was (...) very much bound up with questions of individual independence, autonomy, and self-governance that were also integral to the political objectives of the Risorgimento. The article traces the impact of Owen's educational thought not only in the nineteenth-century Italian context but in the twentieth century as well. It shows how Owen's reflections on the role of education in character formation would prove important to twentieth-century Italian political and social thought. (shrink)

An account of the astrological controversies that arose in Renaissance Italy in the wake of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s _Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem_, published in 1496.

This paper discusses David Roberts's latest book in which he seeks to throw some light on urgent postmodern historiographical issues from the angle of Italian historicism, led by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile . Focusing on the relationship between theory and practice, Roberts argues that there was a close relationship between Italian historicism and fascism. On the basis of the principle that “reality is nothing but history”, both Croce and Gentile sought to develop a philosophy that connects historical (...) thinking to action. In this context, Gentile's presentist interpretation of the historical sublime eventually led to totalitarianism, whereas Croce's radical historicism formed the basis of a more liberal view of society. In his discussion of the reception of the Italian tradition, Roberts rejects Carlo Ginzburg's and Hayden White's “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, and concludes that Italian historicism is still relevant to modern historiography. In this paper I show that Roberts, by renouncing an exclusively philosophical approach to the Italian tradition, tends to overlook the underlying issues. In order to redress the balance, I argue that the political issues between Croce and Gentile went back to profound philosophical differences concerning the relationship between philosophy and history on the one hand and between past and present on the other. From this perspective, Ginzburg's and White's debates about the relationship between history and politics, and the role of the historical sublime in historiography, should not be viewed as “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, but as mere variations on the themes of their predecessors. The relevance of the Italian tradition is therefore not primarily to be found in its response to postmodernism, but in setting the agenda for rethinking the relationship between history and practical life in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This text is essayist, critic and poet Franco Fortini’s introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form. Fortini frames his assessment of Jameson in terms of a contrast with the Italian reception of the dialectical criticism assayed in Marxism and Form.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Reception of René Girard's Thought in Italy:1965-Present1Federica Casini (bio) and Pierpaolo Antonello (bio)Italy provides an important national cultural context for the global mapping of constantly growing interest in René Girard's thought and in mimetic theory. Girard is widely and unquestionably recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of our times. Interviews, public interventions, and excerpts of his books are featured quite regularly in Italian national (...) newspapers and magazines, and, as a result, Girard's name is known outside narrow academic circles.2 All his books have been translated into Italian, including several unique titles, which are available neither in French nor in English, and which are collections of previously unpublished occasional papers or essays.3 The reception of his thought has not been confined to any specific disciplinary ambit; it has been discussed, among others, by philosophers, literary critics, social scientists, cognitive scientists, theologians, and psychoanalysts.4 This article aims at providing a chronology of Girard's reception in Italy, while surveying the critical literature and the intellectual response to his theory, from the publication of his first book to the present. [End Page 139]From the 1960s to the 1980s: Lies and Truth (About Girard) and the Early Reception of His BooksThe first Italian translation of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque5 was released by Bompiani in 1965, with a title that was both misleading and symptomatic: Struttura e personaggi del romanzo moderno (Structures and Characters in the Modern Novel). The reference to structuralism, which was the theoretical fashion of the day in Italian literary circles in the mid-1960s, and the pigeonholing of Girard's exegetical scrutiny as novelistic criticism testify emblematically to the difficulty of classification, plus the substantial misunderstanding that the book withstood both in Italy and in other parts of Europe at that time. To omit mensonge and vérité from the title of the Italian edition is to ignore the "truth" of the matter, that the book was also a mediation on the structure of human desire, extending outside the limits of representation and literature, branching out into a theory of human behavior and the social dynamic that had a profound psychological, anthropological, and sociological reach. Moreover, Mensonge romantique is a meditation on modernity (the novel being its most emblematic form of representation) and the consequences of the unleashing of increasing levels of "internal mediation" within bourgeois society. The reception of this volume was quite cold, and it was reprinted only in 1981, after the wave of discussion stirred by the publication of the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred. The only review published between 1965 and 1979, by the literary critic Enzo Golino, appeared in 1966 in L'Espresso,6 a weekly magazine that has played, and still plays today, a determinant role in the presentation of Girardian texts to the general public in Italy.Given this minimal reception, it is not surprising that the publication of Girard's groundbreaking work, La Violence et le sacré, in 1972,7 was largely ignored in Italy, in spite of the discussion it stirred in French intellectual quarters and the cultural exchange that Italian intellectuals have always maintained with Parisian cultural circles. The only review that appeared in Italy was by Paola Daniela Giovannelli, a literary critic and an expert on Italian theater, showing that the new work clearly still suffered from the same kind of disciplinary classification and reception as Mensonge romantique. In fact, it appeared in the literary journal Lingua e stile, and it discusses the anthropology of sacrifice and the interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from ethnology to psychoanalysis to myth, that feature in La Violence et le sacré in terms of a "theatricalization" of anthropology, mainly due to Giovannelli's disciplinary interests and the book's focus on Greek tragedies.8 [End Page 140]However, Girard's name finally burst onto the intellectual scene in Italy in 1980, when the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred was released by Adelphi, with the title La violenza e il sacro.9 This marks the "official" entrance of Girardian thought into the Italian cultural debate, as the volume was hailed by a series of... (shrink)

Receptions of Descartes is a collection of work by an international group of authors that focuses on the various ways in which Descartes was interpreted, defended and criticized in early modern Europe. The book is divided into five sections, the first four of which focus on Descartes' reception in specific French, Dutch, Italian and English contexts and the last of which concerns the reception of Descartes among female philosophers.

Among the numerous influences and reciprocal interactions between France and Italy at the beginning of the 20th century, it is interesting to investigate the complex case of Louis Rougier’s reception of Italian mathematical logic (including in particular the contributions by some members of the Peano school: Giuseppe Peano, Giovanni Vailati, Alessandro Padoa, and Mario Pieri). This paper aims to investigate the role and the influence of the Peano school on the inversion of this French tendency of philosophers to (...) ignore logic and mathematics. My claim is that Rougier was not only personally interested in Italian mathematics and logic, and in particular in the innovations made by Peano and his school, but used it to support a project of renewal of French logic and scientific philosophy. Rougier recalls the contributions of the school to axiomatics and to mathematical logic, in order to criticize the standard teaching of logic in France, mainly based on syllogistic theory, as well as the view, still defended by his teacher Goblot in 1907, that mathematical proofs are largely based on intuition. For this purpose, any reference to Hilbert’s axiomatics would have sufficed. The reason why Rougier refers also to Peano and his entourage is related to a common interest in linguistics and in epistemology. (shrink)

In this article I propose a conception of “civil religion” to bridge the tension between immanence and transcendence that has characterized Italian Theory to date. This tension is due to the two central components of Italian Theory, namely, the discourse on biopolitics and the discourse on political theology. In what follows I argue that this conception of “civil religion” originates with Machiavelli and is functional to his vision of democratic constitutionalism. I propose a new genealogy of this conception (...) drawn from the history of the reception of Alfarabi and Averroes in western political thought. The article explains that the difference between civil religion and political theology consists in the former maintaining the priority of worldly happiness over otherworldly salvation. The article concludes with a reflection on how this concept of worldly happi- ness can serve to contrast the “biopolitical” pursuit of private happiness. (shrink)

This essay discusses the reception of Gentile's ideas in Britain before the Second World War, identifying the key figures and events that contributed to his enduring reputation. The central figure in Connelly's account is R.G. Collingwood, whose assessments of Gentile, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes harshly critical, yet in fact deeply ambiguous, reflect the changing tenor of the debates over Italian neo-idealism in the Anglophone world.

ABSTRACTThis article has two aims. The first is to explore the early reception of James Steuart in Italy, focusing on Giovanni Tamassia’s writings. In his Dello spirito di riforma, written between 1799 and 1800, Tamassia was the first Italian author to assume Steuart as a point of reference in economic analysis. Largely re-proposing Steuart’s considerations on the issues of redistribution of land, of luxury, and of comparison between ancient and modern times, he contributed decisively to the first circulation (...) in Italy of the Principles of Political Economy. The second aim is to shed light on the singular reading given by Tamassia of Steuart’s thought. In his works Lezione di economia politica and Delle scienze e della libertà relativamente al commercio, the Italian author proposed an economic liberal reading of the Principles. Deliberately downplaying the importance attributed by Steuart to protectionist policies, he attempted to demonstrate the compatibility between the economic theories of Steuart and those of Smith in the matter of economic freedom. Rather than being based on the grounds of a rigorous economic analysis, Tamassia’s reading reflected a deliberate attempt to make Steuart’s thought compatible with an economic and political culture centred on the defence of freedom. (shrink)

We report the results of a study which tested receptive Italian grammatical competence and general cognitive abilities in bilingual Italian–Sardinian children and age-matched monolingual Italian children attending the first and second year of primary school in the Nuoro province of Sardinia, where Sardinian is still widely spoken. The results show that across age groups the performance of Sardinian–Italian bilingual children is in most cases indistinguishable from that of monolingual Italian children, in terms of both (...) class='Hi'>Italian language skills and general cognitive abilities. However, where there are differences, these emerge gradually over time and are mostly in favor of bilingual children. (shrink)

Oberman, H. A. Quoscunque tulit foecunda vetustas.--Bouwsma, W. J. The two faces of humanism.--Gilmore, M. P. Italian reactions to Erasmian humanism.--Dresden, S. The profile of the reception of the Italian Renaissance in France.--IJsewijn, J. The coming of humanism to the Low Countries.--Hay, D. England and the humanities in the fifteenth century.--Spitz, L. W. The course of German humanism.

The diffusion of Vygotsky’s work in Italy was analysed by first considering the issues related to the translation of his texts since the 1970s, particularly with regard to the project promoted by the publishing house of the Italian Communist Party and supervised by the author of this article. Second, the reception of cultural-historical theory was discussed in the context of Italian psychology and medicine in the 1970s and 1980s. After an early acceptance of Pavlovian theory by a (...) few Italian psychologists linked to the Communist Party, the need was felt to overcome physiological reductionism in relation to the new social and psychological problems connected with the development of Italian society. Finally, a brief reference was made to Italian neo-Vygotskyan trends in various areas of contemporary psychological research. (shrink)

It may seem faintly absurd to claim or imply that a Vergilian cento has suffered unjustified neglect from scholars. These works—of which there are sixteen, covering a period of over three centuries within Late Antiquity—are usually treated at best with amused tolerance, and at worst with angry disdain. Though always ingenious, sometimes funny, and occasionally informative about the reception of Vergil, they are seldom admired. Even among Italian scholars, some of whom have paid much attention to centos, a (...) recession has set in since the annus mirabilis of 1981, which saw two editions of the Medea of Hosidius Geta. Proba has, deservedly, attracted more attention than most; her aims and methods as a Christian poetess were carefully and illuminatingly studied twenty years ago by Reinhard Herzog, and her interest as a female Roman aristocrat has brought her further attention, especially in recent years. The main aim of the present article is to suggest a particular context and a serious purpose for her cento. A postscript will show that it went on to enjoy considerable popularity until the end of the century, and an introductory section will discuss its date, but very briefly, since Matthews has convincingly said most of what needs to be said about a recent attempt to redate it. Proba's preface, much of it not in cento form, calls for detailed treatment from various angles—textual, literary, historical—and will be explored in a separate article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latin Poets and Italian GodsDarja Šterbenc ErkerElaine Fantham. Latin Poets and Italian Gods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xii + 229 pp. Cloth, $55.Which kind of gods and religious experience does Elaine Fantham study in her book on Latin poets and Italian gods? Instead of a fruitless quest for the origins of religion, Fantham examines minor gods in Latin literature. The idea for writing (...) a book on “Italian” gods stems from the laudes Italiae in Augustan literature and the range of the discussed passages on gods of Rome and Latium is impressive, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses to Statius’ Silvae and Carmina Priapeia. This study of religious beliefs and literary representations of the gods reveals a vivid picture of ancient worship of the minor gods, especially as portrayed in Latin literature. In addition, Fantham pays attention to earlier Greek and Hellenistic models of the poetic representations of the gods in her discussions of different kinds of texts (elegies, epics, epigrams, inscriptions).My review will concentrate on the notion of religion and gods presented in this book. The first part of the book (“Honouring the Italian Gods”) consists of three chapters (“Rustica Numina: Country Gods of Italy and Their Reception in Roman Poetry,” “Virgil’s Gods of the Land,” and “Ovid’s Fasti and the Local Gods of the City”), which originally comprised a series of public lectures for a general audience. The second part, entitled “Counter-Examples, and the Triumph of Artistry over Fading Devotion,” consists of three further chapters (“Ovidian Variations: From Friendly Flora to Lewd Salmacis and Angry Acheloüs,” “Gods in a Man-made Landscape: Priapus,” and “Gods in Statian Settings”). Whereas the literary evidence presented in the first part concerns the worship of these gods, the second part with its “Counter-Examples” discusses poetic representations of the gods which according to the author do not have a direct connection to the religious life and worship of the gods; therefore, Fantham speaks of “fading devotion.”In her preface Fantham describes Ovid’s Fasti as “replete with echoes and reconstructions of primitive Roman worship” (ix). Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Fasti depict “the devotion and will to believe,” but non-Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the second part, stand for “detached fantasy” (ix). Fantham’s stated purpose is to provide “a better sense of what was gained and lost when Rome’s increasingly cosmopolitan culture moved beyond Augustus’ renewal or re-creation of Italian religion to replace piety with fantasy and emotional detachment from Italy’s countryside and its gods” (xi). The underlying idea of the book is that the worship of the agricultural gods, nymphs, and forest-gods was a real, authentic religion of the Latins. But, Fantham’s is a modern conception of what real, authentic religion in ancient Italy was supposed to be. Unfortunately, this notion of religion does not take into account the recent research on Roman religion which concentrates on the epigraphic evidence (as well as many other kinds of textual evidence, including literary) and stresses the dominance of orthopraxy (correct ritual performance) over a close, emotional relationship between the god and the worshipper. Such work, acting as a corrective to the assumption of an [End Page 693] ancient, authentic, emotional relationship with the gods in supposed agricultural rituals as imagined by James Frazer at the end of the nineteenth century, could have been usefully incorporated (e.g., J. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion [Bloomington 2003] and M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome [Cambridge 1998]).In the first chapter Fantham outlines the evidence for the survival of cults of rustic demigods and stresses the fact that rivers and springs were conceived by the ancients as gods and nymphs and were worshipped in various cults. Thus, each river or spring was worshipped individually, and the traces of many different local spring nymphs or river gods remain in numerous inscriptions. The inscriptions dedicated to the nymphs presiding over healing springs range from fulfillment of vows to nymphs who healed a person to the defixiones in which the petitioner asks the nymphs to curse a rival. Fantham also presents various... (shrink)

This article aims to provide an insight into the ecumenical work of a Hungarian Benedictine monk, Gellért Békés. First, I offer a short overview of Békés's life, who was forced into exile by the socialist regime and who spent almost half a century as Professor at the University of Saint Anselm in Rome. Next, I review Békés's publications and the main thrust of his thinking in the field of ecumenical theology. The central part of my article is devoted to the (...) presentation of his Italian monograph (Eucaristia e chiesa, 1985), which can be considered to be his most important work and in which he gives a comprehensive account of his ecumenical theology of the Eucharist, especially in the light of the Lima Document of 1982. His major contribution lies in the fact that he took into account the interrelation between the various ecumenical documents and he integrated the newly retrieved dimensions of the Eucharist. He also commented on the idea of Real Presence developed by the Lima Document in the light of Catholic doctrine. Last but not least, this article wants to contribute to the reception of Békés's thought, which has hardly begun even in his own country. (shrink)

In this chapter, I shall analyze the reception, development, and the resulting practical / political implications of antispeciesist moral philosophy and animal ethics in the Italian philosophical tradition since the translation of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I shall begin by recalling the successful reception of Singer’s contribution and later of Tom Regan’s, as well as the establishment of the journal Etica & Animali directed by Paola Cavalieri and the formation of animal welfare organizations. I will then (...) retrace the transformation of activism following what has been called—with a term that I deem to be improper – “political antispeciesism”, articulated on the basis of arguments that combine, in a single set, claims for animal rights and human rights. Finally, I shall go on to a reconstruction of the contemporary debate, which revolves around the opposition between “weak antispeciesism”—intended to establish the autonomy of antispeciesism from the struggles for human rights—and the aforementioned political antispeciesism. What will emerge from my reconstruction is a different conception of the ideology of dominion over animals, and therefore of speciesism, compared to the ethical model that has come to establish itself as prevailing in Italy. (shrink)

In celebration of the centenary of the Italian philosopher Cornelio Fabro’s birth (1911–1995), this paper investigates the essential theoretical traits that undergird the framework of Fabro’s 1941 texts, by comparing them with Franz Brentano’s (1838–1817) project of renewing Thomism through a new understanding of Aristotle. The secondary literature concerning the comparison of both these authors is almost nonexistent. Our goal is to clarify some of the central issues regarding the relation between Fabro and Brentano through direct textual analysis of (...) unpublished letters exchanged between Fabro and Agostino Gemelli about Brentano and his pupil Carl Stumpf. (shrink)

The commentary of the Italian physician and philosopher Pietro d'Abano on Bartholomew of Messina's Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's 'Problemata Physica', published in 1310, constitutes an important historical source. In a section of the corpus Aristotelicum that was not part of the standard curriculum at the medieval university, the commentary of Pietro d'Abano investigates the complex relationship between text, translation, and commentary. The eight articles in this volume provide valuable insights into the manner in which Pietro d'Abano deals with the (...) problems of a translated text. They emphasize the idiosyncrasy of his approach in comparison to his contemporaries and successors, the particularities of his commentary in light of the habitual exegetical practices applied in the teaching of curricular texts, as well as the influence of philosophical traditions outside the strict framework of the medieval arts faculty. (shrink)

Religion is considered a cornerstone of business ethics, yet the values held dear by a religion, when professed by business organizations serving heterogeneous market segments in secularized societies, can generate conflict and resistance. In this paper, we report findings from a study of stakeholder reactions to the renaming of an Italian public hospital. After the construction of new facilities, the hospital was renamed for the recently canonized Roman Catholic Pope John XXIII. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence of (...) public criticism surrounding the name change. A fine-grained analysis of a sample of 734 respondents belonging to different stakeholder groups revealed that consumers predominantly supported the name change, while employees were often critical and concerned about possible religious influences on medical practice and scientific research. Moving beyond our empirical setting, we propose a process model of brand-religion alignment inspired by McCracken’s : 71–84, 1986) meaning transfer model, which considers both the alignment process and its reception by relevant audiences. The study also presents managerial implications useful for those brand managers who wish to create effective, respectful links with religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Research has found humour and gender to be linked, 96–113. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.006; Kotthoff 2006, Gender and humor: The state of the art. Journal of pragmatics, 38, 4–25. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.003), specifically within languages/cultures, The pragmatics of humour across discourse domains. John Benjamins, for jokes in Russian). In this respect, women are often subject of jokes and, in some cases, this reproduces the gendered imbalance of suitable roles in private and public spaces. In this paper, I examine the message of two jokes told (...) by Italian fathers policing their daughters’ sexuality, as well as the interactions between myself and these fathers on Twitter. Using Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, 141–164. doi:10.1080/17405900701464816; Lazar, 2018, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. In J. Flowerdew, & E. J. Richardson, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Routledge), Social Media Critical Discourse Studies. In J. Flowerdew, & E. J. Richardson, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Routledge) and through adapting a framework designed to approach sexist jokes, 207–228. doi:10.1558/genl.v1i2.207), I discuss: the ‘who/what the text is about’, and a desire to a traditional fatherhood emerging from the interactions in it’s just banter and the good and happy father. Specifically, I discuss fatherhood as linked to an ontological desire, 213–239. doi:10.1558/genl.v5i2.213) in connection to an alleged transition from old to new fatherhood, 76–92. doi:10.1177/0011392112464231) in Italy. (shrink)

The Canon of Avicenna, one of the principal texts of Arabic origin to be assimilated into the medical learning of medieval Europe, retained importance in Renaissance and early modern European medicine. After surveying the medieval reception of the book, Nancy Siraisi focuses on the Canon in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy, and especially on its role in the university teaching of philosophy of medicine and physiological theory. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology (...) to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how at the end of the Sixteenth Century, translating in latin modern and comtemporary historiography, first written in Italian, had limits: as S. Lambino saw reading Nicola Stupan’s translation into latin of the Dialoghi della historia by Francesco Patrizi, the latin language could not carry out the vivacity and the colours of the modern discourse, and even could not translate exactly the meanings. The modern texts in this kind of translation could acquire a larger (...) audience, but could also lost part of their identity: in this case, the fact does not depend from the ability of the translator but actually from the convenience, or inconvenience, of the ancient language, unable to adapt exactly the modern concepts to ancient ways of thinking and writing. (shrink)

Summary The reception process of Aristotle's Mechanical Questions during the early modern period began with the publication of the corpus aristotelicum between 1495 and 1498. Between 1581 and 1627, two of the thirty-five arguments discussed in the text, namely Question XIV concerning the resistance to fracture and Question XVI concerning the deformation of objects such as timbers, became central to the work of the commentators. The commentaries of Bernardino Baldi (1581–1582), Giovanni de Benedetti (1585), Giuseppe Biancani (1615) and Giovanni (...) di Guevara (1627) gradually approached the doctrine of proportions of the Renaissance architects, some aspects of which deal with the strength of materials according to the Vitruvian conception of scalar building. These aspects of the doctrine of proportions were integrated into the Aristotelian arguments so that a theory of linear proportionality concerned with the strength of materials could be formulated. This very first theory of strength of materials is the theory to which Galileo critically referred in his Discorsi where he published his own theory of strength of materials. Economic and military constraints are determined as the fundamental reasons for the commentators’ commitment to developing a theory of strength of materials that later linked Galileo's work to the practical knowledge of the architects and machine-builders of his time. (shrink)

This article offers an insight into Yoḥanan Alemanno’s study of the ‘art of thinking’ through his notes from Averroes’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics, De anima and Parva naturalia. This case study represents an important example of the 15th-century Jewish learning based on the Arabic-Hebrew philosophical tradition and shows the continuity between the Provençal world and the Italian Renaissance. The textual appendix included at the end of the article aims at showing how Alemanno selected portions of Averroes’s commentaries on logic (...) and psychology that define the role of the faculty of imagination and the processes through which we acquire true knowledge. (shrink)

SUMMARYSir John Harington's 1591 translation of ‘Ludovico’ Ariosto's Orlando Furioso has been much maligned for its free translation, digressive notes, and the translator's obtrusive presence. This essay addresses the question of Harington's accommodation of his audience using Paul Ricoeur's notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ to consider how Harington invites English readers to engage with the Italian poem. Harington's exegetical notes and paratextual aids serve as a privileged site or ‘third text’ between the source and target texts to adapt Ariosto for (...) English readers. The translator's anglicising strategies are grounded in contemporary Elizabethan reading practices, while also emulating the exegetical apparatus that accompanied the Italian reception of Ariosto's poem. Domestication strategies Harington employs include the anticipation of his audience's cultural biases, an emphasis on historical events of interest to English readers, and the inclusion of personal details that create cultural bridges between the reader, the translator, and the Italian author. (shrink)

Fourteenth-century logic gave rise, among others, to the genre De scire et dubitare, which offered a unified framework for discussing different forms of epistemic sophisms by utilising the underlying systems of epistemic logic. One of the problems introduced in this context already by the founding father of this genre, William Heytesbury, was the so-called axiom of positive introspection, i.e., the principle that an agent who knows that something is the case, knows that she knows that it is the case. Owing (...) to Heytesbury’s enormous popularity in the subsequent centuries, discussion of this problem became relatively widespread. This debate was addressed already in Boh’s seminal Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages, which, despite its limitations acknowledged by its author, is a standard source. The present study elaborates on Boh by extending the corpus of his works and drawing new connections based on that. The core of the survey consists of an analysis of the positions of William Heytesbury and John Wyclif, their Italian reception by Peter of Mantua, and the “continental” reception of Heytesbury by John of Holland. The main goals of this study are to formalise the key arguments, which makes it possible to address the underlying systems of epistemic logic and their respective “strength”, and to articulate the conceptual background of those arguments and systems. The gist of the debate is, on one of the sides, an attempt to prove that it is impossible to doubt whether one knows that something is the case by employing whether the principles of positive introspection and of distribution of knowledge over implication, or the principles of positive and negative introspection combined. (shrink)

From an historical point of view, the Italian reception of Whitehead’s philosophy of religion turns out to be defective and the last translation of Process and Reality is the occasion to fill these gaps. The evaluation of Whitehead’s position in the field of analytical philosophy of religion, the right contextualization of his thought and a critical interpretation of the fifth part of Process and Reality show that regarding Whitehead only as the father of process theology is rather reductive (...) and even misleading. His legacy grows more fruitful considering the recent development of analytic philosophy of religion, with peculiar reference to his reflections on religious language and evil. (shrink)

In this paper we offer an overall account of the complex and multilayered Italian reception of Hans Jonas’ philosophy, with an eye to its specific features compared to what happened elsewhere. After an introductory foreword the paper is structured in four sections and a brief conclusion, each of which deals with a peculiar aspect of Jonas’ thought: ethics and bioethics, philosophical biology and ontology of life, gnostic and religious studies, studies in the history of philosophy. In the final (...) section we sum up the overall meaning of the «Wirkungsgeschichte» of Jonas’ philosophy in Italy and highlight possible lines of research still to be accomplished. (shrink)

This book focuses on the reception of classical political ideas in the political thought of the fourteenth-century Italian writer Marsilius of Padua. Vasileios Syros provides a novel cross-cultural perspective on Marsilius’s theory and breaks fresh ground by exploring linkages between his ideas and the medieval Muslim, Jewish, and Byzantine traditions. Syros investigates Marsilius’s application of medical metaphors in his discussion of the causes of civil strife and the desirable political organization. He also demonstrates how Marsilius’s demarcation between ethics (...) and politics and his use of examples from Greek mythology foreshadow early modern political debates (involving such prominent political authors as Niccolò Machiavelli and Paolo Sarpi) about the political dimension of religion, church-state relations, and the emergence and decline of the state. (shrink)

The bibliographical reception on Machiavelli during the Siglo de Oro was usually limited to the Discourses and the Art of War . In this article, I argue that this consideration is not correct, because in Pedro Mexía‘s Silva de varia lección is contained a version of the biography of the Italian militar. Despite the arrangements introduced by Mexía, the version offered, except for being shorter, is sustantially identical to Machiavelli‘s work.

This article describes the recent reception of Giovanni Gentile and his doctrine of actualism, describing the philosopher's rehabilitation as a major Italian thinker and actualism as a provocative account of socially situated consciousness. The discussion then turns to the future of Gentile studies, focusing on ways in which the ahistorical methods of analytic philosophy might help restore actualism and its author to their proper place in the philosophical canon.

An Italian abstract of my thesis, which contains an interpretation of the most important issues of Anaxagoras' philosophy and the early history of his reception (among his disciples, the Academy and, prominently, Aristotle).

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who died at the stake, is one of the best-known symbols of anti-establishment thought. The theme of this volume, which is offered as a collection of essays to honor the distinguished Bruno scholar Hilary Gatti, reflects her constant concern for the principles of cultural freedom and independent thinking. Several essays deal with Bruno himself, including an analysis of the Eroici furori, a study of his reception in relation to the group known as the Novatores, and discussions (...) of several important aspects of his stay in England. The authors and texts discussed here are linked by a relentless interest in the question of authority and originality, and they range from literary figures such as Alberti (1404-72), Vasari (1511-74) and the proponents of quantitative verse in sixteenth-century England to controversial philosophers who, like Bruno, were condemned by the Church, such as Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) and Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585-1619). Taken together, these chapters show how much that was new and revolutionary in early modern culture came from its confrontation with the past. Martin McLaughlin is Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford. Elisabetta Tarantino is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Italian at the University of Warwick. (shrink)

The Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri developed a distinctive Marxist approach of critical analysis, which has prompted extensive responses. The reception of his work in the United States in the 1970s and 80s – the intervention of Fredric Jameson, especially – forms an important moment of historiographical mutation, in which the status of Tafuri’s politics holds an intriguing place: it was eviscerated in the very act of its affirmation. At stake is not simply the problems attending the transatlantic (...) migration of a body of architectural theory, but also a question lying at the heart of Tafuri’s analysis: the problems of achieving social reforms, above all, in ‘working-class housing’. The difficulties encountered by projects to improve accommodation – from Weimar Germany and Red Vienna in the 1920s to the programmes of postwar Italy – provide the concrete material for Tafuri’s analysis while remaining a significant blind-spot within most of the commentary. Tafuri is here reappraised in the light of the political debates over the ‘neorealist architecture’ of the 1950s and the reform-policies of the Italian centre-Left in the early 1960s. Proceeding as if this formative moment never happened, Tafuri’s critics often engage in debates which confuse his critique of the building projects with political despair, and which appeal to enclave-building despite Tafuri’s explicit questioning of such strategies. (shrink)

This article describes the recent reception of Giovanni Gentile and his doctrine of actualism, describing the philosopher's rehabilitation as a major Italian thinker and actualism as a provocative account of socially situated consciousness. The discussion then turns to the future of Gentile studies, focusing on ways in which the ahistorical methods of analytic philosophy might help restore actualism and its author to their proper place in the philosophical canon.

The favorable reception that was received for the book Per salvare la democrazia in Italia (Rubbettino, 2019) did not prevent some demanding readers from raising objections to some passages included in part five of the book, containing proposals to improve the functioning of our democratic system. It was therefore decided to take advantage of the period of forced domicile imposed by the pandemic to write this new book, whose primary objective is to clarify the passages in question while explaining (...) the proposed innovative solutions in a simpler manner, starting with the description of his own career path and ending with a suggestion for changing the way of doing politics in Italy. The second objective is to make readers aware of the enormous impact exerted by European legislation on the Italian legal system--Translated from back cover. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Thomas Paine was one of the protagonists of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, the dissemination of his political thought in revolutionary Italy has not been the subject of much research. While some remarkable works have appeared in recent years that focus on his reflections in Italy, for almost two centuries his oeuvre has remained under-studied and his most famous works were not translated into Italian. This article proposes to investigate the critical reception of Paine’s (...) writings in Italy in the last decade of the eighteenth century within the framework of the political philosopher’s activity during the Revolution. An examination of Italian counter-revolutionary thinkers’ perception of Paine’s theories will lead to an analysis of the political aims and editorial characteristics animating the Italian editions of Paine’s writings that appeared at that time. These translations did not concern his most famous works, in which Paine reflected philosophically on political issues, but rather little-known pamphlets with concrete political aims. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Crisis of ExemplarityFrançois Rigolot“Every example is lame” (Tout exemple cloche), acknowledged Montaigne in the last chapter of his Essais. 1 Was this the moaning of a lone, disillusioned skeptic or the idiosyncratic formulation of a widely shared attitude of mistrust at the end of the sixteenth century? To answer this question one must first examine the epistemological status of examples at the end of the period we (...) still conventionally call the “Renaissance”; and this is the purpose of this group of papers. 2In his work on the notion of exemplum in early modern France and Italy John D. Lyons helped restore the concept of exemplarity to its central place in the history of rhetoric. 3 From Aristotle’s paradeigmata—simple case stories at the orator’s disposal (Rhetoric 1.2. 1356b)—to Montaigne’s “lame” exemples—contingent instances unfit for demonstrative purposes (Essais III, 13, 1070)—the rhetorical impulse has followed strangely circuitous ways. Part of the confusion is probably due to the transformation of technical language under the pressure of common usage. Throughout the early modern period, while the Latin word exemplum continued to refer to rhetorical practice (an illustrative anecdote with a moral point), its vernacular derivatives (esempio, ejemplo, exemple, etc.) generally had a broader, looser, and less didactic meaning, as the emphasis was displaced to the “narrative” aspect of instances, regardless of their intentionality. In other words, although examples were often used to illustrate a didactic point, they differed from exempla inasmuch as they were not always meant to serve a demonstrative purpose.Of course, to the extent that choosing an example necessarily involves some form of selective process from a larger quantity of material, every instance is [End Page 557] bound to entertain a metonymic relation with a greater whole. But, etymologically, an example (essample, in Old French spelling) is a sample, one thing merely alleged to resemble another one, not a demonstrative tool. Yet in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), Randle Cotgrave gave polysemous English equivalents for exemple and exemplaire:Exemple: 1) An example, sample, patterne, or president [sic] to follow; 2) a copie, or counterpane of a writing; 3) one thing alledged to prove, or inforce another that resembles it.Exemplaire: 1) A patterne, sample, or sampler; 2) an example, president [sic] or precedent, for others to follow, or to take heed by; 3) also, the copie, or counterpane of a writing. 4There is an odd mixture of demonstrative and non-demonstrative connotations. The two seemingly interchangeable words receive tripartite definitions, with the three meanings of exemple corresponding to the three of exemplaire.In Renaissance humanistic oratory the evocation of examples was often a simple matter of style. For better elocutory purposes public speakers were encouraged to use graphic case stories to make their speeches more appealing and enjoyable, but orators also used what they called exemplars (Latin exemplaria) to provide their audience with models of conduct to imitate. Worthiness was the ultimate criterion for exemplarity. Cato and Socrates were living symbols of moral determination and courage. They became powerful exemplars of ancient “virtue,” or moral fortitude (Latin virtus; Italian virtù). In the selective process of arguments (inventio), they were chosen because they exemplified a specific attitude or line of conduct: they were, by definition, exemplary examples. 5In the Renaissance the uplifting reading of ancient exemplars was closely related to the doctrine of imitatio, the sacrosanct recourse to inherited cultural models. At the same time the appeal of mimesis, characterized by the actual experience of the real world in reaction to scholastic insularity, greatly problematized the reception of ancient models. Whereas a long-held reverence for the imitative power of traditional exempla offered compelling patterns of moral conduct, the new attractiveness of a more “natural” mimetic discourse [End Page 558] tended to turn the study of models away from duplication. 6 In the face of the inexhaustible diversity and unpredictability of human actions, how can we choose a proper model after which to pattern our own behavior? This is one of the many questions raised by the humanist’s disenchantment with imitative symbols of moral conduct.In recent years the concept... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of Carl Schmitt and his Nazi engagement by chronologically examining the changing uses of Roman law in his Weimar and Nazi thought. I argue that Schmitt’s different ways of narrating the modern reception of Roman law disclose, first, the Nazification of his thought in the spring of 1933, and second, the partial and apologetic de-Nazification of his thinking in the 1940s. While Schmitt’s Weimar-era works are defined by a positive use of Roman (...) imagery, ranging from Schmitt’s support to the Catholic Church to his endorsement of Benito Mussolini’s ‘total state’ in Italy, Schmitt’s Nazi writings from 1933 to 1936 describe the reception of Roman law as an anti-German virus that must be overcome by the Nazi movement. This shift mirrors Schmitt’s transformation from an authoritarian thinker sympathetic to Italian Fascism into a devoted Nazi. However, once Schmitt begins to see that Germany will lose World War II, he recalibrates his position. While Schmitt’s earlier Nazi writings offered a negative estimation of the historical school of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in his 1943/44 book on European legal science, Schmitt portrays Savigny as the paradigmatic European, whose work opens the path for a renewed legal science. (shrink)