Explores the symbiosis of philosophy and literature in understanding negativity.

Les trois études rassemblent des réflexions du philosophe sur trois problèmes de méthode spécifiques : le concept de paradigme, la théorie des signatures et la relation entre histoire et archéologie.

Roscoe Pound, in the introduction, gives a panorama of the various schools of legal philosophy, & places natural law in its proper perspective relative to ...

"Contents: " "Man Without Letters." Newton, the Enigma. Paolo Toscanelli and His Friends. Alessandro Volta. Galileo Today. Necessity, Contingency, and Natural Law. Prologue to Parmenides. Galileo and Oppenheimer. The Role of Art in the Scientific Renaissance. The Italian Novel Today--A Note on Realism. The Seventeenth-Century Legacy: Our Mirror of Being. Philolaos in Limbo, Or: What Happened to the Pythagoreans? Paralipomena of the Future. Vico and Descartes. Eudodux and Plato: A Study in Chronology. "Scientific Rationalism." Einstein (pour le decennal de sa (...) mort). Les Grandes Doctrines Cosmologiques. De Bruno a Leibnitz. Postface a Galilee; Les Suites de l'Affaire. La Storia da Riscrivere. Fato Antico--Fato Moderno. Salvemini. Il Rovescio della Medaglia. (shrink)

My paper is going to illustrate how a universal normative ground can be individuated behind Richard Rorty’s political philosophy, chiefly as he develops it in his well-known Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I shall show how a foundational moral assumption is constantly backing his active defence of liberalism, which defines “cruelty” as “the worst thing we do” and claims that “no well-grounded theoretical answer” can be given in reply to the interrogative “why not be cruel?” After delineating very briefly Rorty’s two (...) crucial concepts of “ethnocentrism” and “antirepresentationalism”, a clear understanding of which is necessary to appreciate Rorty’s position, I shall focus my attention on Rorty’s conception of cruelty. Structuring within a consistent frame the many hints that he furnishes with regard to this issue, I shall determine its most frequent and characteristic features, the study of which shall resolve into the individuation of the concept working as the universal normative ground for his liberalism, namely an underlying pain-aversion principle, which regularly supports Rorty’s claims against cruelty – and ergo his claims in favour of liberalism. Such a discovery is tantamount to the realisation that a contradiction undermines Rorty’s negation of the possibility to find a “well-grounded theoretical answer” to the question “why not be cruel?” Specifically, either a metaphysical aversion to pain is presupposed by Rorty, as Christine Korsgaar’s study on the sources of normativity can help us to see, or a similar point is actually inherent to Rorty’s arguing and acting pro liberalism, as he has been doing for more than twenty years. In the former case, the contradiction would be formal; in the latter case, the contradiction would be performative. (shrink)

Semblanza de G. Tagliacozzo a través de las distintas voces que, desde su infancia hasta su muerte, lo llamaron en su vida: las primeras vocaciones de grandeza , las voces de la academia , la voz de América , la impelente voz de Vico , la voz de los caminos que la naturaleza recorre .Semblance of G. Tagliacozzo through the voices that he followed from his younger age to his death: the first calls for greatness , the voices of academy (...) , the voice of America , the impelling voice of Vico , and the voice of the ways that nature runs. (shrink)

Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, belonging to that tradition of Italian Oriental studies that stretches from Ignazio Guidi to Leone Caetani, Carlo Alfonso Nallino and Francesco Gabrieli - he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian (...) fascist regime was introduced, in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. (shrink)

How and why did experience and knowledge become separated? Is it possible to talk of an infancy of experience, a "dumb" experience? For Walter Benjamin, the "poverty of experience" was a characteristic of modernity, originating in the catastrophe of the First World War. For Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin's complete works, the destruction of experience no longer needs catastrophes: daily life in any modern city will suffice. Agamben's profound and radical exploration of language, infancy, and everyday life (...) traces concepts of experience through Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Benveniste. In doing so he elaborates a theory of infancy that throws new light on a number of major themes in contemporary thought: the anthropological opposition between nature and culture; the linguistic opposition between speech and language; the birth of the subject and the appearance of the unconscious. Agamben goes on to consider time and history; the Marxist notion of base and superstructure (via a careful reading of the famous Adorno–Benjamin correspondence on Baudelaire's Paris); and the difference between rituals and games. Beautifully written, erudite and provocative, these essays will be of great interest to students of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and politics. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language and all but one appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several central concerns of Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and (...) Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. (shrink)