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Atticism and Antagonism: How Remarkable Was It to Study the Sophists in Renaissance Venice?
Get PDFThis article briefly investigates the reasons for Aldus Manutius’ inclusion of Alcidamas in his printed edition of Isocratean orations in 1513. These reasons have not been properly studied by historiography, even though the importance of the collection has previously been described. By systematically exploring three different levels of book production—the epistemic, material, and social ones—it seeks to understand how the career of the sophist Alcidamas in Renaissance Venice can be used as a useful case-study to represent Greek information management and printing in terms of network analysis
Crisi, decadenza, barbarie. Radici e futuro dell\u27Europa nel pensiero di E. Husserl e M. Henry
Get PDFNowadays, a general agreement exists that European culture suffers from a severe type of economic and cultural crisis. In the first section of my contribution I intend to provide a comparison between Husserl\u27s diagnosis of European crisis developed in the Vienna Lectures (1935) and Henry\u27s account of barbarism in his book La barbarie (1987). If, on the one hand, Husserl argues that such a critical condition compels Europe to choose between the sunset of its culture and its rebirth through a new foundation of rationality, on the other hand Henry maintains that the barbarism prefigured by Husserl actually is the cultural horizon of our time. Under these premises, my core argument is that both Husserl and Henry suggest that Europe has the opportunity of overcoming its crisis through a new reflection about intersubjectivity, empathy, and social interaction.
Keywords: Crisis, Barbarism, Phenomenology, Intersubjectivity, Empathy
Costituzione e crisi. Ripensare l’Europa con Jürgen Habermas
No full textJurgen Habermas is regarded amongst philosophers who have analyzed the new political configurations beyond the nation-state, playing a vital role in the contemporary debate on the European constitution and democracy. Focusing primarily on his works devoted to the European integration, the intent of this paper is to analyze the implications of his re-thinking of the “constitution” and the democracy in Europe, starting from the theme of the national constellation crisis. It argues that Habermas’ attempt to rethink political identity at the European level is somewhat of an extension of his analysis in Facts and Norms which reveals tensions in relations to the constitutive political plurality of Europe. Moreover, the paper outlines in which sense Habermas’ recent appeal to the concepts of “divided sovereignty” and “divided/shared constituent power” represents a novelty since it explicitly tries to theorize the EU as a federal, non-statal community. In this regard, this paper discusses some objections to Habermas’ proposal which have surfaced in the debate
The Logik by Rudolf Hermann Lotze: the concept of Geltung
Get PDFThe subject of this paper is Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s concept of Geltung as him outlines it in the second Logik (1874). This paper, through the notions of gnoseological immanentism and anti-psychologism, aims to shed light on the notion of validity (Geltung). The Geltung’s concept is very interesting not only for the role that it plays in Lotze’s philosophy, but also for the importance that Lotze’s validity has in the philosophical debate until the 1930s
Il fondamento «sovrapolitico» della politica: l’attualità della prospettiva jaspersiana
No full textEmblematic of Karl Jaspers’ awareness of the present and his thoughtful concern for it, are two works written in critical periods of European history: Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931) and Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (1958). These analyses still have great relevance today since they express Jaspers’ conviction that what defines the crisis of a certain epoch is not the mere historical situation with its particular socio-political conditions, but the inauthentic and irresponsible way man relates and reacts to such a set of circumstances. The two representative writings show a substantially analogous pattern of reasoning: in so far as they both identify the two main crisis factors with the absolutization of Dasein’s reality and with the closedness to transcendence, and they both appeal to the “conversion” of the individual as the only way towards the resolution of the crisis. Lastly, the call for the individual’s transformation culminates, in both writings, in the idea of an invisible solidarity between self-realized existences, which finds further consistency in the supra-political «community of reasonable people» described in the 1958 text.  
Becoming European: the Europe of Karl Jaspers
No full textThe present paper expounds Karl Jaspers’ thought about Europe, its past, its peculiarity and its destiny. The drastic changes of the modern society (Die Geistige Situation der Zeit, 1931) and the collapse of the Second World War (Rencontres Internationales de Geneve, 1946) offer the philosopher the chance to think over the causes of the dramatic crisis of the European spirit and, at the same time, to pinpoint the reasons of a possibile restart. The European thought is put in connection with the ideas of history, possibility and humanity, so that its core can be translated in an endless process of becoming-a-man. Considered that the rebuilding of Europe has to grow on the basis of a new conscience of the Europen identity, Jaspers reassesses also the role of politics and philosophy in order to sketch a political and cultural project putting in the middle the idea of the human-being-to-do
Quale fondazione per la politica europea? Il bene, il potere e l\u27impolitico a partire da Roberto Esposito
Get PDFThe present contribution tackle the question of which kind of philosophy is apt to thinking contemporary Europe. In order to thematize this problem, the philosophy of Roberto Esposito is analyzed in detail.
The central idea of the paper is that contemporary politics cannot be founded upon classical metaphysical instances, such as God, a teleological structur (as in communism), or some other moral good. The foundation of contemporary politics must rely in politics itself. Esposito’s philosophy of the “impolitico” can help us in thiking this. Following his path, we claim that Europe is to be conceived as a political structure that has its origin in its own “outside”: Europe must take responsibility for its constitute lack of identity, for its own fragility. In this fragility and in the community of death lies the potential for an immanent foundation of European politics
Lotze e Scheler: emotivismo e autocoscienza
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand it aims to show the main traits of Lotze’s theory of emotion, focusing specifically on the correlation between emotion and self-consciousness, and, on the other hand, to demonstrate how Lotze’s theory of emotion plays a key role in the phenomenology of emotional life as propounded by Max Scheler. Indeed their shared belief is that one should be able to understand one’s own individuality through one’s emotional state and not through theoretical operations such as reflection or thinking. Accordingly I argue that Lotze and Scheler suggest an emotional account of self-consciousness which manifests itself as closely related to an individual’s moral sensibility
L’espressione del pensiero Lotze e la confutazione di Hegel nella Logica del 1874
No full textIn the present article, I will discuss Lotze’s attempt to “sublate” (aufheben) Hegel’s conception of logic in his Logic of 1874. I will demonstrate that Lotze operates as a filter by recasting many Hegelian notions in a way that will influence the 20th-century philosophers in a decisive manner. In the first section, I will focus on how, according to both Hegel and Lotze, the relationship between representation and language conditions the transition from sensible impressions to concepts. In the second section, I will discuss Lotze\u27s re-elaboration of Hegel\u27s idea of the objectivity of thought based on his notion of validity. In the third part, I will finally show how Lotze\u27s revaluation of the function of imagination in the domain of “logic” (in a straightforward opposition to Hegel’s underestimation thereof) allows us to re-discover the early modern idea of logic understood as an ‘ars inveniendi’