Nietzsche’s life and thinking have been deeply influenced by the experience of illness and the related struggle to health, in a way that goes far beyond the very well-known episode of his mental breakdown. In the first part of this paper the history of the reception of the topic is reconsidered, focusing on the initial, “moral” interpretation of health and illness in Nietzsche, on the later stances of Thomas Mann and Georges Canguilhelm, the former offering a psychological perspective, the latter (...) a physiological one, and ending with an overview of newer studies on the question. The second part deals with Nietzsche’s understanding of human finitude, suffering and death, and contrasts it with post-humanist and trans-humanist assumptions. Health in Nietzsche is not standardized; it’s a result of self-cultivation, that is, of the full development of one’s potenBal. In the end an idea of health as a dynamic balance is developed, that also draws oh Gadamer’s reflections on the art of medicine and on the practical dimension of human experience. (shrink)

Contemporary debate explores and enhances the relationship between philosophy and translation from various perspectives and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, there seems to be a lack of reflection on the aesthetic significance of the relation- ship between philosophy and translation and the specificity of the translation of philosophical texts. After attempting to explore the reasons for this, the paper aims at showing how philosophy reveals the aesthetic side of conceptual production when it is confronted with the problem of translation, both as a (...) translation of experience into concepts and as a translation practice of conceptual language. (shrink)