Philosophical Readings
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Maurizio Bettini, Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture (Torino: Einaudi, 2023).
No full textIl testo allegato è la recensione del testo di Maurizio Bettini Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture. In questo testo l\u27autore, intavolando un dialogo con i lettori, cerca di definire il valore della cultura classica imponendosi in quel dibattito tanto acceso alzato dai movimenti di decolonizing classics e cancel culture.
The file uploaded is the review of a Maurizio Bettini\u27s text: Chi ha paura dei Greci e dei Romani? Dialogo e cancel culture. In this short book the author tries to define the value of classical culture moving through a dialogue with the movement known as "decolonizing classics" and "cancel culture"
The Secret Letters of Gasparo Contarini to Trifon Gabriele
No full textGasparo Contarini (1483-1542) was born into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Venetian Republic, and rose to become one of the most prominent intellectuals of the first half of the Cinquecento. His philosophical work is mainly known for the dispute with his teacher Pietro Pomponazzi on the immortality of the soul. His vast philosophical oeuvre has gone practically unnoticed. It is my intention here to examine certain features of Contarini’s thought that might serve to illustrate his intellectual sophistication as well as his views on the immortality of the soul. My focus will be on three letters that Contarini sent to Trifon Gabriele (1470-1549), who was known as the “new Socrates” because he left no written documents. The correspondence between these two “titans” of Venetian culture in the Cinquecento is of the utmost interest not only because of the calibre of the writers themselves, but also because Contarini urges Gabriele not to divulge their letters. The fact that Contarini calls for secrecy for these letters, however, is a matter of interest: what do they contain? Was there anything that might compromise Contarini in a context of extreme Counter-Reformation tension
Heiner Mühlmann, La natura delle culture: bozza di una teoria genetica della cultura, a cura di Gianluca Bonaiuti; con una postfazione di Gianluca Bonaiuti e Antonio Lucci (Milano-Udine: Mimesis, 2023).
No full textThis is a review of the book written by Heiner Muhlmann: The Nature of Cultures: A Blueprint for a Theory of Culture Genetics, published for the first time in 1996. My analysis refers to the second edition of the text, which was made public in 2023. The written outlines a genetic theory of culture which examines the dynamics of its genesis under various perspectives that covers areas of biological and scientific relevance, according to an historical-sociological framework. The outcome is a cyclical and iterative model structured in 5 phases that first analyze the local rules that set up the cultures and their inheritance; then, the physiologically-determined dynamics that trigger their development and lead to the emergence of a new cultural constitution. This is a cyclical pattern.Muhlmann’s study shows how Cultures is an active and warlike system that "generates war and which is generated through war"(pg. 7), the evolution of which is associated with the genetic transmission of traits between generations. It is a current reading that reflects the drama of contemporary reality, where the cruelty of cultures seems to leave no room for any form of humanity. In all of this, do human beings hold the key to all of this atrocity
Christian Onof, The Problem of Free Will and Naturalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).
No full textChristian Onof, The Problem of Free Will and Naturalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)
Lucio Cortella, L\u27ethos del riconoscimento (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2023).
No full textQuesto testo è una recensione del testo L\u27Ethos del riconoscimento di Lucio Cortella, edito Editori Laterza 2023
Review to Lorenzo Bernini, Le teorie queer: un’introduzione (Mi- lano - Udine: Mimesis, 2018, ISBN 9788857541259).
No full textLorenzo Bernini, Le teorie queer: un’introduzione (Milano - Udine: Mimesis, 2018, ISBN 9788857541259)
The Pagan Gods in Marsilio Ficinoʼs Christian Platonism
No full textThe basic aim of Marsilio Ficino is to unify Christianity with Platonic philosophy, while referring to the “ancient wisdom” present in both. However, for him, Platonic philosophy comes hand in hand with ancient gods. To make use of them, Ficino claims to write not as a theologian but as “poet”. Most typically, the ancient gods are allegories of astral influences on human affairs. But according to Platonists, stars are ensouled beings, gods expressing their effective powers – not just natural forces. Here, Apollo/Phoebus, the solar god and allegory of the Sun, is of special importance: for Ficino, solar and light metaphysics is generally crucial. In his De vita, he demonstrates how the stars, i.e. the ancient gods in their mythological context, help cure human bodies, including the subtle-material body, i.e. the animating “spirits”. This “magical” cure is made possible through hidden and ubiquitous sympathies between all the stars, metals, stones, animals, flowers, and sensual qualities in general, which are all interlinked with certain gods. Although Fi- cino emphasises that this system of natural magic is lim- ited to “nature”, it seems that, in fact, his “imitating of the stars”, and thus of the ancient gods embodying them, can ultimately have a higher, theological relevance.
 
The Location of God: A Medieval Question on Pantheism and Its Responses in Early Modernity
No full textPeter Lombard discussed in his Sentences (lib. 1, d. 37) the meaning of the statement: Deus est in omni- bus. It was an aside, as he noted, for it diverted the per- spective from theology proper to the relation of things to the Creator. He differentiated divine presence as potency and essence and also as grace. Thomas Aquinas com- mented on the problem, both in his commentary on the Sentences and in his Summa theologiae, noticing the dan- ger of pantheism (ante litteram, of course) when focusing on created things. During the Renaissance and early mod- ern scholasticism the question: Where is God? and its le- gitimacy became a litmus test of Christian philosophy. Francisco Suárez and Théophile Raynaud reconstructed the history of the notion of divine omnipresence and its biblical hermeneutics and pointed to heretics past and present. Rodrigo de Arriaga responded by relating omni- presence to action at a distance in physics. Honoré Tour- nely, then, responding to Spinoza’s pantheism, empha- sized the otherness of God against rationalizing and natu- ralizing the divine. The formula, ‘God is in everything,’ discloses the conundrum that God’ s omnipresence is equally real, substantial, effective, particular, and universal
Review to Byung-Chul Han, Le non cose. Come abbiamo smesso di vivere il reale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021, trad. di Simone Aglan-Buttazzi, ISBN978-88-06-25109-3)
No full textReview to Byung-Chul Han, Le non cose. Come abbiamo smesso di vivere il reale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021, trad. di Simone Aglan-Buttazzi, ISBN978-88-06-25109-3
Epistemic semblance in Metaphysics
Full text linkSimon Blackburn, in Truth A Guide for the Perplexed (Blackburn 2006), deploys the relation of thought with the facts and says, ‘We met the argument that theorizing involves an impossible activity of stepping outside our own skins and pretending to a ‘transcendental’ point of view, a standpoint from which we can survey the relationship between our thoughts and facts, without using the very forms of thought whose relation to the facts we are hoping to describe.’ (Blackburn, 2006, 109) My philosophical reflections on this claim appreciate the view and turn towards the epistemic semblance in the metaphysical purview. A few challenges of the theory take up a side-effect of the ‘knowing procedures’ and its subsequent notion of the rigid concomitance of realism without a human face. My endeavor would be to slightly bypassing the account of objective realism and debut into the sphere of the old-fashioned query ‘what do we know about the conceptualized world where concepts steadily contaminate objects?’ We may appreciative beliefs and concepts, which are human creations as these impart to the human-experienced world where concepts are the objective features of the subject’s conceptual scheme.
Keywords: Epistemic, Realism, Anti-realism, conceptual schemata, Concept, intensional, supervenience, Ontology
References
C. B. Martin and John Heil, 1999, ‘The Ontological Turn’, in New Direction in Philosophy (Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XXIII), Boston, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Donald Davidson, 1973, ‘On the Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47: 5-20.
E. E. Smith & D. L. Medin, 1981, Categories and Concepts, Cam, Mass: Harvard University Press.
E. H. Rosch, 1975, ‘Cognitive representations of semantic categories’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104, 192-233.
Hilary Putnam, 1998, “After Metaphysics, What?”, in Metaphysics: The Big Questions, eds. Peter Van Inwagen, Dean W. Zimmerman, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Hilary Putnam, 2015, “My Intellectual Autobiography,” In Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. Randall E. Auxier, Douglas R. Anderson & Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1-110, Library of Living Philosopher Series, Illinois: Open Court Press.
Jerry Fodor, 1998, Concepts, Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
John Perry, 2001, Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness, Cam, Mass and London: MIT Press.
Karl Popper, 1972, Objective Knowledge An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1989, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge.
Sanjit Chakraborty, 2020, The Labyrinth of Mind and World: Beyond Internalism-Externalism, London, New York: Routledge.
Sanjit Chakraborty, 2016, “Putnam’s Internal Realism: A linguistic Sketch of World,” in Language, Mind and Reality, ed. Ranjan Kumar Panda, Boca Raton, Florida: Brown Walker Press.
Simon Blackburn, 2006, Truth A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Penguin Books.
, What Do We Really Know? The Big Questions of Philosophy, London: Quercus.
Thomas Nagel, 1989, The View From Nowhere, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
W V Quine, 1961, ‘On What There Is’, in From a Logical Point of view, Cam, Mass: Harvard University Press