Among today's Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante. Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari's writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Paradiso and Giotto's frescoes to a new consideration of Dante's "European" idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises (...) issues, and tries to understand the Divine Comedy in Dante's terms. Cacciari approaches Dante's Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo of Paradiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari's analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path. (shrink)

This book views Massimo Cacciari's career. As well as being an academic philosopher who has devoted his life to active politics, he is also one of the most high-profile intellectuals in contemporary Italy. This busy man's bibliography is massive because he has published more than forty authored and coauthored books, several of them translated into all major European languages, and has written hundreds of articles, interviews, essays, and journalistic pieces. The range of his study has ignored the borders of academic (...) specialization, and he has often broken new ground with impressive competence. In his most ambitious theoretical books, he shows a masterful command of classical antiquity, Neoplatonism, and Christian theology, but many of his works are far from being simply accessible to the reader who is not well learned in Greek and German literature and philosophy. It proves that the author's conclusion is not just poetic; his emphasis on possibility is just the beginning of a new phase in philosophy because possibility means chance and chance is infinite only before it is realized. (shrink)

In the age of print, the disposition and density of words on the page conveyed specific messages about how texts were supposed to be read. In the current proliferation of electronic supports, “knowledge design” is required to make sure that the process of passing on information becomes an effective transfer of knowledge. The article addresses the cohabitation of print environment and digital environment with reference to the recent debate on the digitization of learning and the so-called “digital colonialism.” The bi-dimensionality (...) of tablets and e-book readers vs. the tri-dimensionality of books and reactions from intellectuals to digital reading and learning are also addressed. Teachers in the age of over-information are now assigned the role of “cultural djs.” A reappraisal of ancient rhetoric in its classic three-part subdivision is therefore needed: invention, disposition, and elocution. (shrink)