Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 2 Seiten: 735-752.

This paper deals with the role played by science in the elaboration of a philosophical image of nature. In particular, I will consider two alternative approaches. On the one hand, I will look at Sellars’ distinction between the manifest image of man, stemmed from common sense framework, and the scientific image, which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities to explain the behaviour of perceptible things. On the other hand, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s redefinition of the Husserlian distinction between the (...) natural dimension of lifeworld and the artificial horizon of scientific attitude. I will show that Sellars’ scientific realism turns out to be a mere reduction of Nature to complexes of physical particles; by contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s emergentism describes Nature as an articulated structure divided in different layers, each of them understood as a self-organizing totality. Accordingly, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation of Philosophy of Nature, as an attempt to think the complexity of reality, becomes an inquiry on the way through which “Science” arises from the symbolic and virtual behaviour of that living organism called “man”. (shrink)

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken (...) and embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

In the seventeenth chapter, the discussion of the relationship between the organic whole of the historical work and its individual storylines (previously mentioned as parts of history), which began in the sixteenth chapter, continues. It turns out which of them are essential to the general course of events, and which do not affect it, and therefore may be ignored. Obviously, the continuation of such consideration is in the following chapters.

As relações entre homem e natureza,no pensamento medieval, podem ser examinadaspor diversos ângulos e por todos eles leva-se emconsideração a Deus, como criador. As posiçõesextremas do homem ante a natureza situam-seentre a contemplação e o domínio. Dois pensadoressão aqui examinados: Hugo de São Víctor ePetrarca.

Die romische Philosophie kennt kaum einen originelleren Dichter als Lukrez, der zu den grossen Vermittlern und Weiterdenkern griechischen Gedankenguts zahlt. Ausgehend von den Lehren Epikurs, entwarf er in seinem Buch "Von der Natur" eine Philosophie, in deren Mittelpunkt die Theorie der Atome steht. Aus ihren Bewegungen leitete er nicht nur die Feinstruktur der Materie, sondern auch den Aufbau des Universums und die Formen der Seele, des Geistes und der Wahrnehmung ab. Es ist ein streng materialistisches System, in dem fur die (...) Gotter kein Platz mehr ist - die Welt wird von den Naturgesetzen regiert. Lukrez, der sich in scharfer Polemik gegen alle Religion wandte, sah im Glauben an strafende Gotter den Hauptgrund der Todesangst, die er fur alles Ungluck und alle Schlechtigkeit der Menschen verantwortlich machte. Auch in sprachlicher Hinsicht gehort das Buch "Von der Natur" zu den eigenwilligsten und genialsten Leistungen der romischen Literatur. Geleitwort von Albert Einstein. Mit Einfuhrung und Erlauterungen von Ernst Gunther Schmidt.". (shrink)

In Berkeley’s writings the topic of light is discussed in two different ways, within a theory of perception and within a metaphysics of nature of a Platonic stamp. In his first work, the original Essay for a New Theory of Vision, light and colours are regarded as condition and object of vision; they are examined as contents of visual perception distinct from tangible perception. Light will be dealt with in a completely different manner in Berkeley’s last work, Siris, in which (...) a spiritualistic reading of the natural world is superimposed on modern science in general and on Newtonian physics in particular. In Siris, light is the instrument by which the causal activity of divine Intellect orders and permeates the natural world. A detailed analysis of the topic of light in the two aforementioned contexts shows inconsistencies and strained interpretations which derive from the apologetic use of the theory of vision in Berkeley’s early immaterialism and from the multi-layered and confused speculations of his late Siris. On the whole, Berkeley conceives light within the idealistic frame inherited from Platonic metaphysics of light; however, the specific themes examined in the Essay for a New Theory of Vision and in Siris derive from acquisitions of modern science, and are recast within a spiritualistic interpretation which intended both to neutralize scientific ideas through their phenomenistic reading and to exploit them for apologetic ends. (shrink)

The end of ideologies was declared in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In that moment, the way opened for the affirmation of a neoliberal and Darwinian society which proposes itself as a law of nature, thus affirming that it is not itself an ideology. It is a vision based on now-outdated 19th-century anthropology superseded by current scientific knowledge. The new conception of Man is very different and reveals a path to a profound anthropological revolution, the only possibility (...) for a real alternative to the neoliberal socio-economic model--Translated from front flap. (shrink)