Il volume contiene i testi più significativi relativamente alla nascita e allo sviluppo della dottrina dell'analogia dell'essere. I passi sono riportati a fronte con traduzioni originali annotate e sono raccolti in due sezioni: quella di filosofia antica e tardoantica e quella di filosofia medievale araba e latina. La prima sezione comprende i principali testi aristotelici che della dottrina dell'analogia dell'essere hanno costituito l'origine, e i passi fra i più rilevanti della tradizione commentaristica antica e tardoantica, da Alessandro di Afrodisia (II-III (...) sec. d.C) a Simplicio di Cilicia (VI sec. d.C.), nei quali è possibile individuare le prime fasi dello sviluppo di tale dottrina. La sezione di filosofia medievale araba e latina comprende passi scelti dei filosofi che rappresentano le tappe essenziali dello sviluppo della dottrina dell'analogia dell'essere nel medioevo arabo e latino, da al-Fārābī (m. 950 c.) a Tommaso d'Aquino (XIII sec.) a Tommaso de Vio, il “Gaetano” (XV-XVI sec.)--Back cover. (shrink)

Can a material object refer to the divine without attracting to itself devotion and veneration? And, in particular, can a depiction call to mind a reality that subtracts itself from its materiality? There are thus two problems here: whether the divine (God and what pertains to Him) can be rightly said to be represented by an object and whether, in any case, such an object runs the risk of becoming an idol, a little God, an imitation of God. The paper (...) concentrates on the history of the status of images, depending on religions, and the recurrent idea of taking necessarily away the “others”. People belonging to “other” religions are regarded as guilty, idolater, heretic, far away from the true God and the best practises to adore Him. A central year is the 787 CE, for the Nicea II Council, but also for the reactions about it. With all the Platonic-Augustinian suspicion of fictions, the so-called Libri Carolini apportions to images the sole role of bringing to mind the materiality of what is represented thus denying the power of referring to the supersensible: paradoxically, the more an image is “true” and the greater the similarity between the image and its object, the greater is its freight of falsity, insofar as it increases the deception worked on the spectator. The ideas of the Carolingian court cannot be divorced from an artistic production that tended ever more to disconnect a precise meaning from the images made in stone or with the brush, and in due course increasingly regarded sacred history as a pretext for proposing imagines formosae. (shrink)

Athanasius of Alexandria (about 300-373) commented on the book of Psalms, as Jerome stated in 393. This exegesis has not been preserved directly, but it appeared from the sixth century in the Greek catena, and in an unusual form. The commentary, which includes all the Psalms, is divided into 22 centuries, each century being a series of hundred passages. In all there are 2,161 passages, numbered with great precision in a 10th century Constantinopolitan manuscript, the Vaticanus Gracus 754. This division (...) can be dated back to the sixth century, because the text in this form is confirmed by four oriental versions and by a Byzantine anthology from the end of the 11th century. (shrink)

This article contests the division that, up to now, has characterized the two fundamental approaches to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. The first concentrates its attention upon the domain of being and being-there, while the other is concerned with the event and the retroactive coming-to-be of truths. As a matter of fact, it argues that this division misses Badiou’s core proposal: his attempt to renovate materialistic dialectics in order to account for the emergence of novelty in a divided situation. -/- (...) With this context in mind, the focus of the paper is Badiou’s uninterrupted confrontation with Hegel as the source of the most important concepts that build up his post-dialectical dialectics, even after the so called ‘mathematical turn’, that is to say, the notions of scission and subject. Hence, it analyses these categories as they first appear in Théorie du sujet’s dialectics between algebra and topology. Secondly, it explores how they are transposed in L’Être et l’événement, emphasising the latter’s profoundly dialectical articulation notwithstanding its overly structural and potentially misleading orientation. Thirdly, it tries to underline how Logiques des mondes supplements this one-sidedness with the topological approach of a (new) theory of the subject, where Théorie du sujet represents the ‘vanishing mediator’ between the two tomes of Badiou’s magnum opus. Finally, it concludes that Badiou finds in Hegel a doctrine of the event, motivated by the creation of a new figure of man against those of reaction and obscurantism that dominate modern democratic materialism. (shrink)

The tow, the fire, the Heavens and God, Article 156 of Tempier’s Syllabus and John of Naples. Through the examination of the direct textual tradition of the March 1277 condemnation, the indirect tradition and the possible interpretations linked to each of the main variants, the article attempts to reconstruct the original meaning of article 156 of Tempier’s Syllabus. The issue at the heart of the question is whether the impossibility of fire burning the tow after the cessation of the celestial (...) movement is due to the fact that God would then also cease to exist (quia nec Deus esset or quia Deus non esset, prevailing variants in the manuscript and indirect tradition), or to the fact that nature would cease to exist (quia natura deesset, minority variant chosen by Roland Hissette in his own edition of the text of the condemnation published in 1977, and since then commonly accepted). On the basis of the evidence provided especially by two quodlibetal questions by John of Naples, it is suggested that the correction proposed by Hissette is unnecessary, and that article 156 concerns the inseparability of God’s cosmological function as mover of the Heavens from His own Divine nature. The appendix contains the first critical edition of John of Naples’ Quodl. III, q. 10. (shrink)

Pubblicata per la prima volta nel 1916 come raccolta delle lezioni universitarie dell'anno accademico 1915-16, la "Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro" andò incontro a diverse ristampe e traduzioni in lingue straniere, diventando uno dei saggi più importanti nella produzione filosofica di Giovanni Gentile. Partendo dal pensiero di Berkeley, Kant e Hegel, il filosofo elabora quello che chiama "idealismo attuale", spesso abbreviato in "attualismo", corrente che ha conosciuto grande fortuna nel periodo tra le due guerre.

L’Italia rappresenta un luogo del tutto peculiare per gli sviluppi del pragmatismo, fin dai suoi albori. A partire dalla fondazione del Leonardo nel 1903, Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni (e molti altri) contribuirono a riprendere e a diffondere in Europa le principali istanze dei pragmatisti d’oltreoceano. Come è noto, questi filosofi non si limitarono ad essere vivaci interpreti del pensiero di Charles Sanders Peirce e William James, ma elaborarono anc...

Standard interpretations of Kant’s moral philosophy portray him as affording agents very little, if any, latitude to exercise practical judgment for determining the proper course of action. It is typically thought that Kant holds that because all moral duties are determinable a priori and in advance of particular circumstances this leaves little to no room for agents to exercise practical judgment. In this paper I discuss two senses in which Kant does allow for the practical judgment of agents. The first (...) is an interpretation of Kant’s view of practical judgment developed by Onora O’Neill and others. The second is an underappreciated dimension of practical judgment contained in Kant’s texts. It is to a defense and examination of the importance of the second sense of practical judgment that the majority of this paper is dedicated. (shrink)

In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison argues that Kant’s theoretical treatment of the self presents both an incoherent “official view” and a coherent “alternative view.” In this paper, I argue that Kant’s genuine position on the self can be reconstructed as a coherent unity by examining the flaws in Allison’s analysis. It is shown that Allison’s objections to Kant’s official view are based on unwarranted metaphysical assumptions and unjustified conceptual identifications. Allison’s own dual-aspect view of the transcendental distinction between phenomena (...) and noumena is used to correct these misconceptions. Thus, the official view as described by Allison is not Kant’s genuine position. Rather, it is shown that Kant treats the noumenal self as the ground or support of the activity of thinking and the subject of apperception, and that this grounding function is essential to Kant’s view but overlooked by Allison’s analysis. (shrink)

El hombre posmoderno es un Narciso en busca de su identidad. La evaporación del Padre ha camiado las dinámicas en relación con el Otro y la capacidad de construir una propia identidad tiene que recurrir a los objetos de consumo. En este estudio se propone un camino que va desde la teoría clásica del Psicoanálisis hasta una nueva perspectiva que entra en el campo del Márketing y del estudio de objeto de consumo.

The relation between the concepts of the subject of apperception, the phenomenal self, and the noumenal self has long puzzled commentators on Kant’s theoretical account of the self. This paper argues that many of the puzzles surrounding Kant’s account can be resolved by treating the subject of apperception and other transcendental predicates of thinking as a dimension of the noumenal self. Yet this interpretation requires a clarification of how the transcendental predicates of thinking can be attributed to the noumenal self (...) without violating the thesis of noumenal ignorance. The clarification is achieved through a careful analysis of the meaning of the latter thesis. The paper’s interpretation is then shown to be consistent with Kant’s rejection of traditional ontology and with the dual-aspect view. The paper’s final section argues that transcendental predicates are properly construed as logical predicates but must be distinguished from ordinary examples of the latter. (shrink)

In his critical philosophy, Kant considers the 'subject' to be the source and ground of the a priori conditions of experience, but says exasperatingly little to elucidate this crucial notion. Kant's express view in the first Critique is that the self, like other objects of experience, can be considered either through the conditions of experience as a phenomenon, or as it is independently of these conditions as a noumenon. According to this view, the 'subject' that serves as the ground of (...) the a priori conditions of experience must therefore be understood either as the phenomenal or noumenal self. Commentators such as Henry Allison reject Kant's express view as inconsistent with the awareness of oneself as 'thinking subject', however, since the latter is an awareness of the activity of thinking, while 'phenomena' and 'noumena' are concepts of things. ;The dissertation presents an interpretation and defense of Kant's express view of the self against commentators such as Allison. The defense begins by applying the dual-aspect reading of the phenomena/noumena distinction to the self, which is necessary to give the view initial plausibility. It is then argued that the activity of thinking, which is represented by the 'transcendental unity of apperception' or 'I think', is attributable to the noumenal self in the negative sense, or transcendental subject. The activity of thinking is thus conceptually distinct from, but ontologically dependent upon, the transcendental subject to which it belongs. Kant's express view therefore does not, pace Allison, require the identification of the thinking subject, with the 'phenomenal' or 'noumenal' selves. ;The final two chapters of the dissertation consist of closer studies of the concepts of the 'phenomenal' and 'noumenal' selves respectively. The former examines the notions of 'inner sense' and 'self-affection' as they pertain to the phenomenal self. The latter considers the noumenal self as it functions in Kant's practical philosophy. It is seen that the results of both chapters are consistent with the previous defense of Kant's express view of the self. (shrink)