Abstract

In the following interview with Manlio Iofrida, Aldo Giorgio Gargani retraces the fundamental moments and key phases of his intellectual development: his early childhood and adolescence in Genoa, strongly marked by the influence of his artist father and of the social context of the immediate post-war situation; his studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and subsequently at the University of Oxford, which resulted to his first book on Wittgenstein; the achievement during the 1960s of a distinctive philosophical position of his own, reflected in the publication of the book Il sapere senza fondamenti [Knowledge without Foundations]; the renewal of philosophical culture in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, in which Gargani himself was one of the main protagonists; the return to an engagement with Wittgenstein, after a period in which he had dedicated himself principally to literary questions and concerns, one pursued specifically in the context of the new issues raised at the beginning of the 21st century. This historical and autobiographical reconstruction of his intellectual career is accompanied at every turn by philosophical reflections on our contemporary situation and by specific critical responses to other contemporary philosophical trends and developments: the interview thus constitutes a telling summation of the fundamental themes and aspects of the author’s thought in general