Archives

  • NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY
    Vol. 38 (2023)

    From the Introduction: “How far are we from 1954, when Heidegger published the pioneering Die Frage nach der Technik? And how far are we from that analysis, which was based on a peculiar, clear, and reasoned understanding of physis? How far are we also from the first studies on biopolitics, from the end of the era in which life was an undisputed fact and the beginning of an era in which it became a subject of discussion and an object of social engineering or emancipation?

    The current philosophical literature is full of proposals that rarely give equal attention to the two terms of the relationship nature-technology. The rediscovery of the anthropologically characterised palaeoanthropology of Leroi-Gourhan, the developments in ethology after Lorenz, the revival of interest in Simondon, the neo-Heideggerism, the post-phenomenology of Ihde and Veerbek, as well as the spread of SST with Latour and Ingold, are just a few examples, alongside the deep ecological tendencies of the object-oriented Ontology of Harman or Morton.

    The Second Conference of the SIFiT, which took place in October 2021 in Naples, focused on these themes. This issue of the “Bollettino Filosofico” publishes the proceedings, which have been extensively reviewed, also thanks to the lively discussion they provoked. Consistent with the format of the Journal, the essays are divided into two sections, Focus and Forum, which correspond respectively to the lectures and parallel sessions that took place during the conference”.

  • Rethinking Empathy. Between Ethics and Aesthetics
    Vol. 37 (2022)

    RETHINKING EMPATHY. BETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

    The concept of empathy was born in the field of aesthetics thanks to the historian and philosopher of art Robert Vischer: in 1873, he used the term Einfühlung for the first time, in order to indicate the tendency of an observer to project his own emotional states onto the observed object. The first author to transfer the concept of “empathy” to the level of intersubjective relationship was Theodor Lipps, who replaced the concept of projection with that of “emotional participation” made possible by a sort of “internal imitation” (innere Nachahmung) of the movements of the other. Among the first to grasp the ambiguity of the concept of empathy was Husserl, who, despite calling it “obscure, and a downright tormenting enigma”, paid great attention to it, as can be seen above all from the manuscripts of his work. Subsequently, the concept of empathy was extensively investigated in the phenomenological field, especially by Moritz Geiger, Edith Stein or Max Scheler. They always maintained the need of recognizing the radical otherness of the other in the relationship, avoiding the risks associated with the confusion of experiences, which can become indistinction or even “unipathy”. But Einfühlung, which has become a central concept in explaining the paradoxical relationship with the alter, still risks to remain suspended between the problems associated with emotional contagion and those of a cognitive and intellectual process, such as that required by the analogy theories. It is, therefore, a long tour that, passing through analogical inference, reduces the impact with otherness, resulting in an introspective thrust, only to be bent subsequently outwardly. This also opens up a further problematic area concerning the constellation of concepts of empathic experience, along the theoretical axis that goes from the proto-phenomenological analyses of the young Jaspers to the existential anthropoanalysis of Ludwig Binswanger. During the twentieth century, philosophical thought has variously taken up and modulated Lipps’ fruitful intuition and the debate on empathy has developed to produce a real “empathic turn” which, also thanks to the discovery of “mirror neurons”, has largely influenced contemporary aesthetic reflection. The concept of “embodied simulation”, one of the cornerstones of these researches, radicalizing Lipps’ intuition, in fact, presents itself as a further critique of analogical inference, in favor of immediate involvement. Today, the debate on empathy and on the relationship between empathy and aesthetic experience, on the one hand, and between empathy and ethics, on the other, is one of the most heated, also thanks to its involving different but contiguous areas of reflection (cf. for example the relation identitydiversity, individual-community, subjectivation-otherness, art-emotion, reality and fiction, aesthetic creation and enjoyment, expressiveness and technique). Thus, two theoretical lines can be identified. The first, which we could define as “naturalistic-reductionist”, believes that the totality of empathic experience can be explained through neurological mechanisms, which would thus become the foundation of both aesthetic and ethical experience. The second, on the other hand, more exquisitely “philosophical”, while recognizing the importance of a scientific investigation that allows us to understand our immediate relationship with the object (also understood as the other self), claims the role of philosophical reflection in understanding of the pathic, cognitive and reflexive processes that allow us to enter into a relationship with the other.

  • DECONSTRUCTION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS. FROM DERRIDA ONWARDS
    Vol. 36 (2021)

    In the multifaceted and jagged scene of the second half of the twentieth century, in which almost all fields of knowledge experienced the fruitfulness and the drift of contamination between disciplinary areas, methodological procedures and objects of investigation, Derrida’s paradigm of “deconstruction” had particular resonance. Already from the first appearance of the philosopher’s works, telluric movements of small or great intensity have shaken the consolidated rigidity of disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, and history of philosophy. In fact, the readings of Derrida aimed at tracing the genesis of the concepts that have supported various forms of knowledge, and tried to show how the whole architecture of these concepts was less solid or grounded than tradition had believed. Husserl’s phenomenological project, as well as the rethinking of the question of being and its oblivion, and, at the same time, the overstepping (Überwindung) of metaphysics theorized by Heidegger, constitute the ground in which what would soon be called “deconstruction” would germinate, a term which, among other things, was coined in reference to the Heideggerian Destruktion, albeit with the intent of destabilizing the conceptual structures of the onto-theological tradition, instead of aiming at recovering an original and forgotten sense of being. Slowly, but inexorably, categorical sagging, textual cracks, cracks that affected the history of metaphysics, linguistic theories, but also biology or architecture began to appear as the epistemological foundations of forms of knowledge were put to the test and questioned from oblique perspectives. The terrain of psychoanalysis, which, in the same period, was experiencing in France a “return to Freud” hypothesized by Jacques Lacan, would immediately become a place of confrontation not without controversy that still today, more than fifty years after their first appearance, feed debates and theoretical pathways. “Deconstruction” and psychoanalysis, therefore, can be considered as the poles of a voltaic arc that continues to generate questions on the subject’s constitution, on his relationship with the world, on what is considered real, and on the temporalities in which the social bond coalesces. Once the heated disputes are over and the passions of the Derridean and Lacanian moments have come to an end, it will first be a question of reconsidering the terms of the questions which, in any case, have not lost the character of urgency both in the philosophical and in the psychoanalytic; in recognizing the specificity of paths to each of these areas, it will therefore be necessary to relaunch questions that arise (or perhaps come together) in the broader question of the meaning and destiny not only of disciplines and knowledge but, above all, of those who make themselves spokespersons and agonists. 

  • Back to the Origins. Genesis and Evolution of Martin Heidegger’s Thought
    Vol. 35 (2020)

    At the beginning of the 1920s, Martin Heidegger was developing a reflection on “being” which, using the phenomenological method, would give rise to a new ontology. Being and Time, published in 1927, is also the result of a process of gestation which, in the courses and notes of the lectures, in the texts of the lectures and in the unpublished material that preceded it, can still find resources and stimuli for the re-transversal of a thought whose radical nature has not ceased to question historians and philosophers. In recent years, however, the interweaving with some more markedly theological questions (as, for instance, St. Paul’s interpretations or the study of Augustinian anthropology) seems central not only with respect to a more general understanding of the speculative horizon of Heideggerian hermeneutics, but also with respect to the question about the historicity of existence and the irruption of Kairological time in real life (as happens in the first Christian community), with the consequent redefinition of the sense of being no longer as a mere presence or ousia, but as parousia: the question of meaning is charged with a peculiar dramatic tonality in which hovers the temptation to convert the “restless concern” that characterizes every effective life in a metaphysical “appeasing”. The progressive ontologicalisation of the Heidegger lexicon, which turns from the notion of “life” to that of “being” after the call to Marburg in 1923 or which produces a more marked attention to the question of “difference”, raises important questions not only about the continuity or discontinuity of the Heidegger thought, but also about the “effects” that this thought has produced (and continues to produce) in the philosophical debate of our time. Beyond the relevant analyses of Heideggerian philology, it will be a question of reconsidering the theoretical project of a thought which, in its first movements, was interested in phenomenological debates as well as theological ones, in the attempt to compose fractures and conflicts such as, for example, that of the Fribourg period between the factual element of life and the categorisation of experience, that is the contrast between the “obscure matrix” of subjectivity and the semantic or ideal or intentional aspect which is present in actual existence. The almost complete publication of Martin Heidegger’s entire work (in which, it is worth remembering, the philosopher himself has several times retrospectively returned to the genesis of his path of thought), allows us to critically rethink a theoretical production that, as shown by the writings preceding Being and Time, had assumed the historical dimension of the individual as the unique horizon of the possible experience articulated in the forms of a phenomenology of life and that, slowly and starting from more or less explicit “turns”, will move towards the attempt to go beyond the lexicon and concepts of traditional metaphysics.

  • THE OTHER, THE FOREIGNER, THE GUEST
    Vol. 34 (2019)

    If philosophical thought questioned the forms of otherness since its first emergence, the contemporary age saw a sort of haste where these forms intertwined with geo-philosophical challenges, the changing paradigms of social survey and the new areas of knowledge produced by human sciences.

    The acceleration thereby generated also involved philosophy, which was questioned on two fronts: the theoretical formulation or review of the otherness paradigms on which western civilization has built itself, and the epistemological and methodological front where the thinking questions its own way of thinking the other. However, in relation to the social and political situation and to the intense public debate, the philosophical thought cannot avoid to reflect on its own infinite resource: the other, indeed, starting from the forms assumed, asserts itself as injunction and demand, especially when it asks for hospitality (even within theoretical elaboration) or when it manifests itself as a foreigner who, according to Michel de Certeau, is not reducible, without whom living is no longer living.

    Therefore the issue involves thinking again all the theoretical and epistemological issues requested by the otherness, and everything was produced by the western philosophical tradition during its long history, every time it met (or collided with) the foreigner (expression of extraneousness) who requested for a theoretical advancement or a new path, without forgetting theology and the different religious traditions, where the otherness often intertwined with transcendence producing important considerations.

    Calling for networks and bounds between philosophy and various methodological subjects within human sciences, Bollettino filosofico aims to go back over ancient and new issues about the other and its faces, beyond what is taken for assumed, even towards a reflection on the relation that, as Emmanuel Levinas wrote, “incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge”.

  • Ripensare la fenomenologia, con e oltre
    Vol. 33 (2018)

    Inseparable from its historical development, Phenomenology continues to represent a central benchmark of the thought of our time, especially compared to the many fields of knowledge that challenge the hypothesis of Philosophy as a “rigorous science”. The international reception of the Phenomenological Movement started by Husserl, with its various positions, showed from the outset the impossibility of a phenomenological “orthodoxy” and also, perhaps, the intrinsic difficulty of defining a specific thematic object, while the complicated relationship between the universality of essences and the singularity of experiences produced a theoretical force field reverberating throughout all contemporaneity. However, the debates triggered by the phenomenological method (this can include the famous split between Heidegger and Husserl) involved Philosophy also, and above all, its methods, its structures, the schemes through which it has expressed and still expresses itself; those debates called into question the entire history of western philosophical thought. Therefore, questioning phenomenology “with and beyond”, today not only means retracing its important stages or its breaking point with tradition; it also means reconsidering the questions that articulated its evolution and interacted with philosophical reflection and with the other fields of knowledge on which  human reasoning is exercised.

  • Poetry and philosophy compared. Starting from the modern
    Vol. 32 (2017)

    Of all philosophical issues, the question of the connection between poetry and philosophy is the one that puts both terms back into play in a particularly productive way.

    The philosophical gaze passes through poetry and, starting from here, develops a discourse where the word is examined in its historical and temporal role, in order to once again give philosophical thought the instrument which it needs but which it cannot find within the limits of its own argumentations.

    However, philosophical and poetic words cannot be subordinated one to another, but have to stand in mutual trust and knowledge, attempting to understand reality, in spite of the different attitudes and points of view on it.

    Therefore, the point in question will be the sense of a word which is frequented both by poetry and philosophy but is transfigured by the poetic filter, changing itself due to the enigmatic transformation process to which it is subjected.

    Philosophy has frequently tried to position poetry within a general context, betraying in this manner its usual theoretical and conceptual hegemony. Maybe it is time to let prevail once again a position of philosophical listening to the poetic word, allowing poetry to offer philosophy what it wants to and can give to it.

    If we return to the question of the relation between philosophy and poetry, we return also to the question of the relation between the poet and the philosopher. Romanticism was the age when poetry had a privileged place in philosophical reflection, to the point that the figure of poet-philosopher was often identified with the figure of philosopher-poet. In the following decades, and during the twentieth century, while the problems and methods of philosophy were changing, an analogous change in the form and contents of poetry occurred, creating a language modality able to make the expression of thought possible.

    We can shed new light on a transformed, but never effectively interrupted, relation, investigating some phases and the historical and theoretical moments experienced by the thinkers and poets of our time.

    Moreover, to disclose the unexplored horizons of the thinkers-poets of our history would mean an increase in the potentiality of philosophical reflection, since poetry also made use of philosophy when it showed similarities which had been kept hidden by a distance in language.

    The challenge lies in attempting to show them in a new light, both retracing the plot of some exemplary poetic moments, and reconsidering some original tracks in the history of thought.

     

  • The piety of thought. Memory, testimony, forgetfulness
    Vol. 31 (2016)

    Nowadays, speaking of “the pietas of thinking” could be considered as a reference to a general “religiousness”, to a "devotion" which could remove the dismay that crosses both reality and its questioning. For philosophical thought, “the pietas of thinking” can also refer to a specific way of questioning the present time, the world, man through memory and testimony, and also through forgetfulness (which could be a hidden resource of memory and testimony).

    In the course of history, philosophy has always investigated its own process, and because of this it acknowledged that one of its main goals is to be accountable to its work of memory (as implied by the idea of tradition), or to its work of testimony and, again, to its struggle against the forgetfulness which is often the principal cause of the return of ancient violence or fatal ideologies.

    Memory, testimony and forgetfulness intersect or intercept debates which involve Europe and the Western World culturally, philosophically, socially and politically, and they commit philosophy to reshape itself in the light of new forthcoming challenges (as, for instance, the question of “forgiveness” or even the problem of memory in the Internet era).

  • Nihilism and Modernity. Rethinking the Modern Tragicalness
    Vol. 30 (2015)

    “The development of history starts with tragic knowledge”: thus Karl Jaspers meditates on the genesis of human civilization. The tragicalness of historic knowledge realizes itself by passing through the problems of the limits of sense, and related to it, that of nothingness. The question about nihilism has its roots in this speculative ground, representing a kind of modern and polymorphic answer to ancient problems.

     

    Nihilism: a vexed cultural event, that someone has defined “the deep soul of modernity”, is often turned into philosophical charges, aiming to discredit the opponents on logic and moral planes. Starting from Nietzsche, it has become an important basis for several thinkers, who interpreted it, case-by-case, as a transient decline from human rationality, or as the unavoidable result of postmodern fate, to the point that Wilhelm Weischedel defined contemporary thought as philosophizing “in the shade of nihilism”.

     

    The “Bollettino Filosofico” aims to reintroduce the debate on the relation between nihilism and modernity, in order to explore its present conjugation in different disciplinary areas and fields (ethic, aesthetic, gnoseological, political and religious), in the light of the urgency that the questions about the crisis of sense, foundations and values raise in contemporary sensibility; the purpose is, on one hand, to focus the plurality of forms caused by reflecting on such a broad theme; on the other, to identify the unexplored paths of contemporary debate.

     

  • Analytics and Continentals
    Vol. 29 (2014)

    The current philosophical debate faithfully records the changes of contemporary society and expresses his fragmentation, specialization, and difficulty in communication that sometimes seem to reach the incommunicability. In such a situation,  theoretical and historiographical categorizations can respond to the need to "tidy up" in a debate, relaunching it and making visible differences and similarities between the various positions in the field, and so opening up new theoretical possibilities through discussion and dialogue.

    The distinction between analytics and continentals represents a crucial historiographical and theoretical reference point, in order to comprehend and take part in a complex debate characterized by sophisticated forms of contamination between the philosophical traditions.

    Fifteen years after the publication of the book by Franca D'Agostini, Analitici e Continentali, which proposed an inventory of this fundamental comparison, the "Bolletino Filosofico" intends to rethink the issue, in the light of the different philosophical sensibility of the scholars coming from Europe, America and other regions. Hence the idea to devote this issue of the journal to "analytics and continentals", in order to offer a critical overview and an analysis of the current topics in philosophy and the related genealogies.

  • Croce in Between Past and Future
    Vol. 28 (2013)

    This volume, published on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Benedetto Croce, doesn't intend to be a mere celebration or a commemoration of his figure. Croce himself didn't like celebrations and anniversaries, rather preferring the everyday engagement in his work.

    We are certainly far from the cultural climate of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, when some prejudices and stereotypes about the philosophy of Croce were still largely predominant: the old debates appeared outdated only at the beginning of the eighties, when it began to talk about a “return of Croce” in the Italian culture.

     One can wonder if there has been an effective “return of Croce” in the last thirty years. In fact, although the philosophy of Benedetto Croce has never been a dominant trend in the Italian culture, the publishing house Adelphi has restarted to print his works, and the publisher Bibliopolis has notably increased the issues of the “Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Benedetto Croce”. Furthermore, several congresses and scientific initiatives have increasingly arisen again his figure, in Italy and abroad. Thus, while in some foreign countries - such as the United States - the interest in the work of Benedetto Croce has progressively aroused, in Italy the attention for his philosophy has coincided with a renewed interest in the philosophical tradition of our country.

    It would be really difficult to reconstruct the alternating fortunes of the philosophy of Croce in the last thirty years: that would entail an in-depth survey in the fields of the history of ideas, the history of culture, the philosophical historiography, the idealistic and historicist traditions, as well as their reciprocal theoretical implications. The aim of this volume is rather bringing up to date problems and perspectives of his philosophy, in the firm belief that a classic author never belongs only to the past, but he always has something to tell for the future time: that’s why we have entitled this issue of the Bollettino Filosofico “Croce in Between Past and Future” (“Croce tra passato e futuro”).

    It’s furthermore important to highlight that many essays present in the volume deal with questions of the philosophy of Croce, which in the past were unjustly considered “minor” with respect to the questions of historicism and idealism: in particular, the question of “vitality”, the problematic relation between existence and history, the interest for the problems of the religious life, and so on.