Review of: Marino, Stefano, Terzi, Pietro, Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in the 20 th Century. A Companion to Its Main Interpretations, Berlin/Boston, Walter De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 361, ISBN 978-3-11-059613-7.

The contribution aims to investigate the influence of Max Scheler’s _Wesen und Formen der Sympathie_ on Ernesto De Martino’s thought, during the elaboration period of _Il mondo magico_’s theoretical framework. The paper claims that De Martino’s approach to Scheler’s phenomenology can be included among the conditions of possibility of the Italian philosopher’s detachment from idealism and of the formulation of his original epistemological stance. Within this framework, tracing _Sympathiebuch_’s line of influence on De Martino would make possible to read the (...) problem of the experience of magic from a phenomenological standpoint. In the first section, the paper provides an outline of the philosophical and cultural environment in which De Martino came into contact with phenomenology and, specifically, with Scheler’s philosophy. In the second section, the paper presents the features of Scheler’s philosophy that would influence De Martino’s thougt in the first half of the 1940s. To this purpose, the contribution takes into account _Sympathiebuch_’s main conceptual cores, taking as its guiding thread the definition of the phenomenological concept of _Mit-fühlen_ and the possibility to extend its potentialities to an ethnological project. In the third section, the paper presents an interpretation of _Il mondo magico_ in the light of Scheler’s categories, highlighting the argumentative junctures in which the phenomenological conceptual toolkit seems to be most effectively employed by De Martino in the study of magic and ritual phenomenona. (shrink)