Faced by the issue of co-education in his book Opinions, the English philosopher C E M Joad once tried to draw up an intuitive list of the differences between little boys and girls. His list was an intelligent man’s summary of the salient distinguishing features characterised by the non-scientist’s reluctance to invoke behaviouristic factors. He thus opined that boys were more abstract, girls more empirical, boys more inquisitive, girls more obedient, and so on. An analogous account of the relations holding (...) between literature and philosophy will have occurred to people who read widely and credit themselves with a cultured receptivity: their commonest formula is that literature portrays real life while philosophy explains it. At this level of insight come those readers who state as a grave paradox that Dostoievski is ‘really more of a philosopher’ and Plato ‘a creative writer’. Others perceive that though philosophy may achieve the artistic effects of poetry or the novel, it is normally governed by rigour of method; that written philosophy tends to follow Occam’s razor, whereas literature approaches the sublime almost in inverse proportion to the noted rule, since a considerable part of its aesthetic relies on repetition, digression or what the Russian formalist critic Sklovskij termed ‘postponement of the effect’. Perhaps indeed there are some lateral factors, symptoms rather than causes, which do throw light on the parting of company between literary and philosophical writing: there is, for example, no such thing as a child prodigy in philosophy, though such a phenomenon exists in all the arts. Wittgenstein was making his first jottings at the same age when Rimbaud had given up writing poetry. No philosopher has developed a system by the age when most great novelists have formed their style. If personal maturity is a sine qua non of philosophy, it is marginal, even deleterious, to literature, for it may close off and ossify the inspiration, as is thought to be the case with the Wordsworth of 1840 onwards. The writer must in a sense never grow up, not only for the oft-cited reason that he has to remain in touch with the material provided by memory, but also because the disponibilité to experience of youth and early adulthood seems to be the essential initiatory stage of the literary hero. Jacopo Ortis, Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, Felix Krull and Amory Blaine constitute a perennial type for all of whom adventure, travel, temptation and conflict are items of implicit acceptance. (shrink)

Babolin, one of the foremost Italian interpreters of modern German philosophy with a special interest in the direct analysis of the rapport Man/god, self/other than self, has written a close and persuasive account of the German theologian Guardini as a thinker concerned with ‘Otherness’. The methodology, as in his 1965 volume Essere e Alterità in Martin Buber is copious but precise, with a gratifying clear distinction between what the author has added to the chiefly Italo-German tradition of criticism and his (...) own review of that tradition, which is contained in the first section of the book. The second chapter contains an exhaustive review of the theory of ‘polar opposition’ axiomatised in Guardini’s Der Gegensatz which was published in 1925, just two years after Buber’s Ich und Du. Babolin’s third section covers ‘Otherness’ in Guardini’s Welt und Person, published in 1939. (shrink)

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, _Dialogue on the Infinity of Love_ casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love. Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue (...) that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature. By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality. (shrink)

This study proposes a polemical exegesis in three main sections of Nietzsche’s thought on his own central ideas. It makes no pretension at solving philological problems and thus does not, for example, examine those raised by the sister’s edition of Der Wille zur Macht, which de Feo quotes extensively, or the ideological variation between Nietzsche’s aphorisms and published books.

It is not three years since Martin Buber’s death at Jerusalem but not too soon for such a major and systematic re-evaluation of his ontology as that contained in this volume by Babolin. The author proposes nothing less than the initiation of critical debate as to how Man’s openness to being implies his awareness of what is other than himself and leads ultimately to his consciousness of Being as Other. It is a discussion which boldly presents Buber as the highest (...) articulater of the existentialist phenomenology but leads up to and away from this summit with copious documentation and an admirable insight into its slow flowering in German intellectualism; it is a discussion which takes us from the foundation and quality of being through the theoretical implications of human experience to Buber’s supreme and decisive message: ‘Knowledge of Man presupposes knowledge of the absolute, the mystic, Thou’. (shrink)