1,720,993 research outputs found
La vita è ingiusta : il doloroso darwinismo di Primo Levi
No full textA partire dall’incontro con l’opera di Darwin agli inizi degli anni Trenta, Primo Levi eleverà le scienze naturali a incrollabile a priori ontologico della sua riflessione etica e politica. Ciò che si intende mostrare è quanto una solida e consapevole conoscenza del darwinismo abbia costituito il “filtro di lettura” principale della riflessione su Auschwitz compiuta in Se questo è un uomo. È in quest’ottica che il binomio sommersi-salvati, vero e proprio nucleo del pensiero di Levi, rivela tutta la sua portata concettuale. Quest’ultimo rappresenta infatti la risultante socio-antropologica delle leggi inegualitarie della vita, in opposizione alle quali Levi concepisce la disperata necessità della lotta umana contro i limiti dolorosi della materia vivente. Nelle opere della maturità, il naturalismo continuerà a fornire a Levi gli strumenti di base per l’elaborazione di originali soluzioni concettuali a problemi filosofici cruciali come l’origine della aggressività umana, la natura del male politico, il rapporto umano-animale e il nesso natura-civiltà
Totalitarianism : a borderline idea in political philosophy
No full textIn the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present
The Suffering Animal: Life Between Weakness and Power
No full textThis book provides a critical and innovative reassessment of contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting with a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of animal studies, and then a reassessment of Descartes' animal-machine paradigm, Simone Ghelli tracks down the conceptual coordinates of what he calls “the paradigm of the suffering animal.” The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while contesting the metaphysical and anthropocentric structure of western axiology, eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering, that is on the mutual compassion sentient beings feel before the unjust sight of their finitude. The suffering animal paradigm shows how, within our philosophical tradition, the animal question has been always intertwined with the questions of atheism and of materialism. The ultimate aim of this research is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, life and death, which our philosophical tradition largely tends to consider as mutually excluding. To overcome such oppositions means avoiding opposing, in our ethical and political discourse, the defense of the vulnerability of the weak and the freedom of the powerful
The inegalitarian God and the ethics of fortune : on Primo Levi’s atheism
Full text linkThis essay examines Primo Levi’s atheism. First, I reconstruct Levi’s reflection on chance in "If This Is a Man" as the core of his universalist understanding of the concentrationary experience. In Levi, fortune – a moralizing resignification of chance - represents the contingency that decides upon a human existence dramatically marked by the fundamental inequality between the drowned and the saved. This is the philosophical background of chapter October 1944,
where Levi outlines his first attempt of anti-theodicy, from which he sketches the basis of his ethics of fortune. Second, by extending the chronological scope of my analysis up to the 1980s, I define Levi’s philosophical atheism in terms of social anti-theodicy. I show how the question of inequality, natural and political, constitutes the supreme contradiction for a theistic understanding of Providence, whose intervention in the human world tends to increase the onto-anthropological structures of political domination. Finally, I examine the 1971 short story “The brokers”, (“Procacciatori d’affari”) in which Levi outlines the conceptual frame of an ethics of fortune, in which the choice of chance constitutes the fundamental egalitarian act to deactivate the theological and political dispositive of privilege
Contro il privilegio e la disuguaglianza : l’antifascismo di Primo Levi
No full textThis essay examines the political-philosophical contents of Primo Levi’s reflection on
the nature of fascism. First, I reconstruct the historical and political background of
Levi’s «antifascist education» between 1938 and 1943. Second, I highlight the presence
of a very effective inquiry into fascism within 1947’s If This Is A Man, the core of which
is Levi’s discovery of the anthropological-political phenomenon that I name «voluntary
inequality». The third section reconstructs the development during the 1970s of Levi’s
original definition of fascism as «consecration of privileged and inequality». Based on
Levi’s suggestions, the concluding remarks dwell on the genetic connection between the
Memory of the Holocaust and antifascism
Recensione a P. Valabrega, "Rebus Primo Levi. Intervista e saggi (1981-2023)", Aosta, Le Château, 2023.
No full text"Rebus Primo Levi" raccoglie i saggi che Paola Valabrega ha dedicato a Primo Levi tra il 1981 e il 2023. Quarant’anni di riflessione, il cui baricentro testuale è l’intervista del febbraio del 1981 che apre il volume: un dialogo capace di proiettare in avanti la forza euristica di tematiche dimostratesi poi centrali nel sempre più vivace panorama degli studi su Primo Levi
[Recensione a] P. Levi, Il carteggio con Heinz Riedt, a cura di M. Mengoni, Torino, Einaudi, 2025
No full textThe Suffering Animal. On the Weakness and the Power of the Living
No full textThe following PhD dissertation aims to provide a philosophical investigation of the contemporary debate on the human-animal relationship. Starting from a reassessment of modern debate on Descartes’ animal-machine paradigm – polemically built upon a critique of the “official philosophical narration” of current animal studies -, I will then track down the theoretical coordinates of what I named the paradigm of the suffering animal. The suffering animal is a materialist thesis on the condition of the living, which, while atheistically contesting the metaphysical structure of western axiology, it eventually redefines and re-establishes ethics on the experience of suffering. The suffering animal claims the fragility and the vulnerability of the living matter we are all, as living beings, made of. By comparing Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and Nietzsche’s notion of will power, I will highlight how contemporary anti-metaphysical understanding of the human-animal relationship developed through two main guidelines. Indeed, beside the suffering animal, there stands the powerful animal, an alternative materialist paradigm claiming rather the power of life and the living beings’ right to express and perform their inner vitality against all those subtle restrictions set by western traditional morality. The analysis contained in the following book examines the commonalities and the disagreements between these two paradigms. Such a confrontation will be carried out through the philosophical productions of two very different Twentieth-Century thinker: Primo Levi and Gilles Deleuze. The ultimate aim of this dissertation is to define the “ethical equilibrium” between aspects of the living, such as weakness and power, joy and suffering, which tends to exclude one another. What is at stake in such an equilibrium is the possibility for our civilization to ground effectively the chance of equality inside and out the border of our species. This might be possible if the suffering animal and the powerful animal harbouring in each of us succeed in standing one to one without rising up one another
The unbearable weight of luck. on primo Levi's atheism
Full text linkThis article aims to deepen the question of atheism within Primo Levi’s work from a philosophical point of view. Taking into account the current debate on the «sacred» in Levi’s moral reflection, instead I propose an opposite perspective, according to which atheism stands for both the conditio sine qua non and the
landing place of his ethics. At first, I aim to reconstruct the way in which Levi articulates the disassociation between God and Evil, underling how, according to Levi, the concept of Providence is not only illogical, but particularly immoral. Such a perspective evokes a certain affinity with the atheistic tradition which opposed to Christian theodicy over modern philosophy. The conclusion is devoted to an in-depth analysis of the meaning of «Luck» as the only plausible ethical reason for survival
"La condizione neomoderna" di Roberto Mordacci
No full textNota critica di Simone Ghelli a R. Mordacci, "La condizione neomoderna", Einaudi, Torino, 2017
- …
