The young French philosopher, Maurice Blondel, was fascinated by the vinculum substantiale hypothesis proposed by the late Leibniz in his correspondence with Bartolomeo Des Bosses, a Jesuit from Collegio Romano. What did young Blondel see in this intricate hypothesis? An answer to the question can be found by making a thorough critical analysis of two manuscripts of Blondel: «Première notule» and «Nota complementare». The focal point of these texts is the substantiality of the concrete individual. Blondel compares this with some (...) passages from Aristotle's book Lambda in Metaphysics in his search for the «first substance» in its real and ontological sense. In fact, had Blondel known the twentieth century studies of book Zeta Metaphysics he could have found what he was seeking. (shrink)

Quale rapporto c'è tra una noticina di appena 30 righe e un'opera filosofica di quasi 500 pagine? A questa domanda, appassionante per chi s'interessa alla genesi delle opere del pensiero, Simone D'Agostino risponde esaminando il rapporto tra il capolavoro blondeliano del 1893, L'Action, e quella che si suole chiamare la "Première notule" del 5 novembre 1882. Il presente lavoro non è uno studio genetico del pensiero blondeliano, bensì una sua interpretazione sistematica da due punti focali e rispecchiantisi l'uno nell'altro. Sotto (...) questo aspetto, la ricerca di D'Agostino può definirsi unica nel suo genere. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy, both Hannah Arendt and Maurice Blondel are distinguished for situating action at the centre of their reflection. Investigation of their philosophical positions is facilitated by their common and constant reference to Aristotle, especially his findings on praxis. More particularly, both cite and comment on Nicomachean Ethics IX 7, where Aristotle discusses the relationship between benefactor and beneficiary. While Arendt uses the text to show how Aristotle undervalued praxis, through confusing it with poiesis, Blondel exploits the passage for (...) his phenomenology of action, which finds its elusive perfection in a friend. (shrink)

This book supports the idea that the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life does not disappear in early modernity, but is transformed into a search for how to cure, guide, and free the human mind.

In his renowned collection Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot suggests that the original trait of philosophy as a method by which one exercises themselves to achieve a new way of living and seeing the world fails with the rise of modernity. In that time, philosophy increasingly takes on a merely theoretical aspect, tending toward a system. However, Hadot himself glimpses at the dawn of modernity some instances of the original trait of philosophy still very much present, and (...) in his wake, Michel Foucault warns that between the late 16th and early 17th centuries the philosophical question of the reform of the mind attests to a still very close link between asceticism and truth. This book aims to develop just such an idea by thoroughly analyzing the most representative works of the reform of the mind in the early modern period: Francis Bacon's New Organon (1620), René Descartes' Discourse on the Method (1637), and Baruch Spinoza's Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1677). From this analysis it will emerge that these modern works fully deserve to be counted among the tradition of philosophy as way of life. On closer inspection, the inquiries about method elaborated in these works are fully understandable only when read in the light of a broader and more complex philosophical need: to establish the spiritual conditions for accessing truth and aspiring to full self-realization. (shrink)