_Highlights and critically assesses the work of contemporary Italian political philosophers._.

Puts leading Italian thinkers into conversation with established Continental philosophers concerning the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression.

This title offers a cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development book-ended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian philosophy to have emerged during the age of the Risorgimento in reaction to 18th century French revolutionary and rationalist standards in politics and philosophy and in critical assimilation of the German reaction to the same, mainly Hegelian idealism and, eventually, Heideggerian existentialism. This is the story of modern Italian philosophy told through the (...) lens of Renaissance scholarship. (shrink)

Philosophy is cosmopolitan and immune to the influence of the idea of nation; it does not depend on some specific linguistic heritage, and, anyway, tends to be in contrast to the various nationalisms. Nevertheless, in front of the crisis of the very idea of national identity, not only the Ueberweg dedicates an entire volume to the Italian philosophy of the Eighteenth century, but also he reconstructs it on a regional level, following the catchment areas of the single universities, academies (...) and scientific societies as a unit of measurement. The volume shows the usefulness of joining the approach of the philosophical history of philosophy, the traditional history of philosophy, together with the historical history of philosophy, according to the interdisciplinary method of survey developed by the history of ideas yesterday and by the intellectual history today. (shrink)

Back in vogue today is the tendency of Italian philosophy toward reflection on itself that has always characterized an important part of our historiographical tradition. The present essay firstly analyzes the various interpretative positions in respect to the legitimacy, the risks, and the benefits of such a discourse, which intends to distinguish the different traditions of thought by resorting to a criterion of territorial or national kind. Secondly, the essay examines diverse paradigms that identify – in “precursory genius”; in (...) ethical and civil vocation; and in “living thought” – the distinctive hallmark of the Italian philosophical tradition from the Renaissance to today. (shrink)

By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, (...) upon a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments. (shrink)

By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, (...) upon a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments. (shrink)

To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between philosophical ideas and medical and healthcare models. A diachronic analysis is put in place in order to evaluate, from an innovative perspective, the influence over the centuries on medical and healthcare models of two philosophical concepts, particularly relevant for health: how Man perceives his identity and how he relates to Nature. Five epochs are identified—the Archaic Age, Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, the ‘Postmodern’ Era—which can be seen, à (...) la Foucault, as ‘fragments between philosophical fractures’. From a historical background perspective, up to the early 1900s progress in medical and healthcare models has moved on a par with the evolution of philosophical debate. Following the Second World War, the Health Service started a series of reforms, provoked by anti-positivistic philosophical transformations. The three main reforms carried out however failed and the medical establishment remained anchored to a mechanical, reductionist approach, perfectly in line with the bureaucratic stance of the administrators. In this context, future scenarios are delineated and an anthropo-ecological model is proposed to re-align philosophy, medicine and health care. (shrink)

Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy presents for the first time in English the work of many leading Italian contemporary thinkers. It suggests a third way in the hitherto almost exclusively French and German discussion of the deconstructive critique of poststructuralism on one hand, and the emancipatory convictions of post-Marxist discourse on the other. Each essay attempts to establish the validity of this third way, some by developing the concept of "weak thought" through rigorous analysis of Marxism and (...) a reinterpretation of Nietzsche's nihilism and Heidegger's existentialism, and others by developing alternative critiques to postructuralist thinking. (shrink)

Leading Italian philosophers engage issues in ethics, politics, and religion.

The traditional and lively interest in Meinong's philosophy and related topics among Italian philosophers gives rise to this volume of MEINONG STUDIES.

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, (...) politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives. For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today. Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life. (shrink)

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions—among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi— Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence (...) of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and British Deism, or religious reformation. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization. (shrink)

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)

Firsthand perspectives on the past, present, and future of contemporary Italian philosophy.

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)

The paper offers a critical review of Roberto Farneti’s paper a minor philosophy. The state of the art of philosophical scholarship in Italy , recently published in Philosophia. It is argued that overall the status and interest of philosophy as practiced nowadays in Italy is less disappointing than Farneti makes out. It is also maintained that submitting papers to peer-refereed international journals can help cure the moral and sociological disease that besets the Italian academia, but that, as such, it (...) is less likely to improve the scientific quality of contributions in philosophy than Farneti claims. In passing, a few recommendations both to the philosophical community at large and to the Italian Government are put forward. (shrink)

All of the selections in this volume have been newly translated and many of them appear for the first time in English. The editors group well-chosen selections from the Renaissance Italian philosophers around four areas of development of philosophy passing out of the middle ages and into modern philosophy. Renaissance Humanism is represented by Petrarch, Leon Alberti, Lorenzo Valla, and Gianozzo Manetti. Renaissance Platonism includes selections from Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and Leone Ebreo. Renaissance Aristotelianism has pieces from (...) Pomponazzi and Tasso. The Philosophers of Nature included are Telesio, Campanella, and Bruno. Courses in the History of Philosophy too often pass over the Renaissance philosophers, much in the same way as these same courses used to pass over the Middle Ages. Considering the effect that the revitalized Platonism of the Renaissance period had on Descartes and Leibniz, this gap needs to be filled in for a proper understanding of the origins of modern philosophy; this anthology, and, presumably, the companion volume to follow are welcome steps in that direction.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and philosophers (...) a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship. (shrink)

The three-yearly conference of Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS) has taken place in Bergamo, the 15th, 16th and 17th December 2010. The charming venue has been the former convent of Sant’Agostino, nowadays University of Bergamo. The conference program has been structured distinguishing plenary and parallel sessions: the first ones were 40 minutes long and designed for international guests: S. Abramsky from the Wolfson College of Oxford, A. Hagar from Indiana University, P. Janich from Philipps Universitaet (...) of Marburg and S. Okasha from University of Bristol. The complete program of the conference can be downloaded here: . We followed all the plenary sessions, and the first part of our report concerns them. There is just the exception of professor S. Psillos’ talk, which was indeed programmed, but didn’t take place due to greek unrest of the last December. The second part of our report concers the parallel sessions, that were 20 minutes long and designed for concurrent talks split between subject areas. We will keep this division into areas in our report and we chose four talks per area. However, it must be said that we had not watch the parallel sessions completely, since their being simoultaneous. This means that our review of the conference will be perspective, both because of subjective standpoint and because of the mentioned limitation. Still we hope we can offer a quite complete picture of the three-days conference, as we hope this overview may be considered as a general review of it. Just a few words must be still said to introduce to our review. The structure of each review will consists in a presentation of the talk’s author(s) (which we faithfully copy hereinafter) followed by a brief remark by us. Since many compliments could be surely done to the SILFS’ organization and to the University of Bergamo, an overall effect seems hard to be drawn, because of some arising perplexities. Although these are just our shared impressions about the conference, we think they must be remembered. One could note outward that the conference have had three official languages: English, French and Italian. Apparently, this is something that has not been justified since French has been useless and Italian has often prevented the comprehension by foreigner attendance. Many defections have taken place, something that could be said about the conformity with the program (in spite of the high number of speeches). Of course these defections have been caused by different reasons, but they become an indication of lack of professionalism as the number grows. Coming to an estimation of the inner issues, first we are seriously puzzled about the selection criterion (if any) which the SILFS has chosen the invited speakers with. One can notice that excellent talks have been put together to shallow speech without substantial scientific commitment. One has to keep in mind that who is just worthless, much lowers the general level. The topics have been various, although many were historical reconstruction and the "historiographic" approach in the study of Philosophy of Science seems therefore prevailing. Those talks whose subject was Logic and its applications, have been the highest-quality ones, by the fact that they were close to contemporary researches. More specifically, we would like to quote those concerning Quantum Computation and Logic of Quantum Mechanics. Talks of Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Science were first-rate works, too, having showed high proficiency, though even specialistic topics were often technically handled, to the detriment of laymen (as us). (shrink)

Gathering the contributions of eleven contemporary Italian women thinkers who share a philosophical practice, Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers embraces a general interrelationality, fluidity, and overlapping of concepts for a border-crossing that affects what it means to be subjects that are embodied and participants in the life of their communities, thereby shaping a sense of belonging. Common threads are revealed through the exploration of radically diverse themes (the body, subjectivity, power, freedom, equality, liberation, the emotions, symbolism and metaphors, maternity, (...) reproduction, responsibility, the political, the economic) and approaches (autobiographical styles, personal narratives, rootedness in the everyday, advancement of relationality, empathic responsibility, passions, and commitment to the flourishing of the polis). In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context-a context which has not been and still is not always benign toward women's distinctive originality and creativity. (shrink)

With a preface by Gianni Vattimo, this book offers both an overview of contemporary Italian philosophy and a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ in connection with the notion of freedom as the original dynamic of the will to power.

The Italian Pragmatists were a group of philosophers in the early 20th century. They gathered around the journal _Leonardo_, which was published in Florence. This volume emphasizes what they all shared, as well as their value for philosophy and culture.