In queste note parto dal commento di alcuni passaggi dell'ultimo Foucault per proporre un'interpretazione della vita come materia di lavoro, in base alla quale costruire il proprio ethos, nella doppia valenza di daimon singolare e di condotta condivisa. Ciò può condurre a tornare all'idea antica del bios philosophikos, rivista alla luce di un materialismo dell'incorporeo.

The essay compares the Socratic idea of an infinite inquiry, considered as the moving inspiration of philosophy and the idea, analyzed in contemporary epoch especially by Peirce and Wittgenstein, of a knowledge based on the pure description of life and its pragmatic forms, of the indubitable certainty that is the ground of any evidence, acquired through a rigorous zetetics. Here the inquiry is: how can we configure the philosophical method – meth’odos, path – in the intertwinement between lived life and (...) examined life? (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is known today as the first American philosopher, and as the ‘founder of pragmatism.’ Indeed, Peirce was both and much more. In a partial list of roles he played during his life, Peirce graduated as a chemist, published as an astronomer, worked in geodesy, wrote as a philosopher, and defined himself as a logician. While he gained only a partial, late recognition in his time, today the broadness of his interests is reflected by the diversity of (...) the people tha... (shrink)

Ontology is a part of metaphysics; it concerns what there is. Is it possible to consider being and reality not in a traditional metaphysical way—that is, not as a ground, an origin, a cause, but as a movement, a flux, a dynamogenic principle? I will set out from a seminal aphorism by Nietzsche, occurring in Human, all too Human (§2): “A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers. But everything has evolved; there are no eternal (...) facts, as there are likewise no absolute truths. Therefore, historical philosophising is henceforth necessary, and with it the virtue of diffidence”. I will then move on to explore Peirce’s late thought, starting from a passage in a letter to W. James, where the author supports a “futurist” interpretation of reality—as he had in the juvenile writings—and speaks of “the reality of the public world of the indefinite future as against our past opinions of what it was to be.” This can be defined as a process of “mellonization,” that operation of logic by which what “is conceived as having been is conceived as extended indefinitely into what always will be”. Similarly, in the Preface to Human, all too Human Nietzsche writes: “Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our today”. I will try to read some Peirce’s statements in a Nietzschean perspective within the context of the plan to develop a dynamic and historical ontology; and I will try to read the “enigma” of Nietzsche’s Eternal recurrence from a Peircean perspective. (shrink)

Eu inicio por introduzir algumas citações que Peirce faz sobre Espinosa. Poucos, mas importantes comentários, sugerem que uma nova consideração da “essência” filosófica pode emergir dessa análise. Conforme lemos na Ética de Espinosa, essência não deve ser considerado como forma pura; tampouco é uma qualificação definida com designações rígidas. Significado é potência: em termos pragmáticos, como buscarei demonstrar, o poder de estar pronto para agir, expandindo a própria disposição para responder, encarnando dado hábito de modo eficaz. Assim, não procede que (...) o significado é, de modo acabado e de uma vez por todas. Antes, este se faz na medida em que é capaz de produzir novos efeitos. Como disse Espinosa, é uma potentia agendium conatusinexaurível que sempre produz uma prontidão para perseverar na ação. Conceitos são mensuráveis à luz de seus resultados: expandem seus efeitos como uma floresta, ou onda, sem uma fronteira ou limite claros. Nossa concepção desses efeitos é o todo de nossa concepção do objeto, diz a máxima pragmática. Significado implica um vasto oceano de consequências inesperadas, Peirce escreve. Em termos espinosistas: ninguém sabe até onde chega o poder da mente – ou do corpo. Lançarei mão de algumas sugestões de Giorgio Agamben e Gilles Deleuze a este respeito, construindo sobre eles para abordar a ética de Espinosa em termos pragmáticos e o pragmatismo numa forma espinosista. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to contribute the debate on “realism” in order to raise a different sort of question: not whether ‘reality’ exists or does not exist, but rather what effects does the belief in this or that reality produce (as Peirce put it 150 years ago). I will turn to Eco’s later thought, and to his support for a form of ‘negative’ realism, and try to demonstrate how his appeal to Peirce’s distinction between Immediate and Dynamical Object (...) is affected by a common-sense interpretation of what ‘real’ amounts to. Peirce in fact distinguished between the “existence” of facts and their “reality.” The former implies a dynamic of blind force, a dynamical reaction. Yet, “reality consists in the future” (CP 8.284), in the public recognition of what it always will be, or we hope will be, in the long run (Peirce uses the word “mellonization”). In Eco’s work, though, the Being or the Real, seen as pure Something, is understood after the form of a Thing, above all External, which simply says many ‘No’s. Peirce’s pragmaticism leads us further on, concentrating on the concept of habit that is also detectable in Eco’s analysis. We could say that Peirce distinguishes brute existence hic et nunc from the persistence of habits. Acts and dispositions to act, and not facts (as opposed to interpretations) appear as real; and it is in this respect that I think we can find a promising line of research for better explaining Eco’s theory of realism. (shrink)

It is not always easy to explain what it means to think in a pragmatist way. Is it simply a way of looking at practical, everyday life matters from a philosophical standpoint? Is it a way of thinking that belongs to a precise theoric movement, as lofty and profound as, for example, the phenomenological or neo-positivistic ones? What distinguishes the pragmatist way of philosophizing? James addresses this question by clarifying that pragmatism is not a doctrine, but an attitude, a tendency (...) to reason in a certain way. Peirce characterizes it as a method to make our ideas clear and produce stable beliefs. According to pragmatists, the meaning of any conception should not be treated as an abstract notion. It should be... (shrink)

The subject of this book is the thought of the American pragmatist and founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce. The book collects the papers presented to the International Conference Semiotics and Philosophy in C.S. Peirce (Milan, April 2005), together with some additional new contributions by well-known Peirce scholars, bearing witness to the vigour of Peircean scholarship in Italy and also hosting some of the most significant international voices on this topic. The book is introduced by the two editors and is (...) divided into three sections, corresponding to the three main areas of the most interesting contemporary reflection on Peirce. Namely, Semiotics and the Logic of Inquiry (part I); Abduction and Philosophy of Mathematics (part II); Peirce and the Western Tradition. (part III). The analysis is carried out from a semiotic perspective, in which semiotics should not be understood as a specific doctrine but rather as the philosophical core of Peirce’s system. As we read in the introduction: “it is semiotics and philosophy or, rather, semiotics as philosophy and philosophy as semiotics, which emerge from a reading of these papers”. (shrink)

I will sustain in this article that Peirce can be seen as the last great representative of that inconspicuous but persistent tradition that, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, spent its energies on discovering a universal language. His project of Existential Graphs is in fact grounded on the isomorphism among a Sheet of Assertion, in which Graphs-signs are drawn, a Mind, with its thoughts-signs, and the Universe, with its facts-signs. In the same sense, Leibniz worked on his Characteristica Universalis, (...) seen as a general Encyclopedia or alphabet of human thoughts, and a pictum mundi amphitheatrum. (shrink)

Stéphane Madelrieux nous livre un ouvrage à la fois d’une rare intensité et d’une extrême clarté, agréable à lire et pourtant exigeant, complexe, profond, un ouvrage qui donne à penser. Comme le souhaite l’auteur, son écrit peut être compris comme une perspective interprétative inédite sur la philosophie française du siècle dernier: une lecture qui met en jeu les positions de Bergson, Wahl et Deleuze, et les entremêle, tantôt en les opposant, tantôt en les assimilant, à celles de Bataille, Bl...

No período antigo – grego e helenístico em particular – a filosofia era concebida não como uma atividade intelectual pura voltada para a busca da verdade, mas como um exercício prático de pensamento que deveria servir à vida e ter como objetivo a autotransformação. O objetivo era aprender a conduzir uma vida filosófica e a cuidar de si: principalmente de suas falas e ações. Não era tão importante poder expor uma doutrina verdadeira, mas sim colocar em prática os ensinamentos que (...) eram dados. Esta perspectiva caduca já no período medieval, mas podemos perguntar-nos se a atitude pragmatista não reanima alguns dos seus aspectos: por exemplo, a enxertia da prática na teoria, a concepção de ideias como planos de ação, a referência a efeitos de verdade, e similar. Neste artigo pretendo testar esta hipótese, especialmente com referência ao estudo que Peirce realizou sobre o processo de “autocontrole” (os antigos diriam “autogoverno”, autarkeia) como base da ética, entendida como uma ciência normativa e o fundamento da lógica. (shrink)

The collection presents a variety of promising new directions in Royce scholarship from an international group of scholars, including historical reinterpretations, explorations of Royce's ethics of loyalty and religious philosophy, and contemporary applications of his ideas in psychology, the problem of reference, neo-pragmatism, and literary aesthetics.

This article includes details about Oration 44 of Gregory of Nazianzus, taken from ‘Gregorio di Nazianzo, orazione 44’ a book by Rossella Valastro, published in 2018. This oration was proclaimed during the first Sunday after Easter in 383, in conjunction with the inauguration of the church of St. Mamas of Caesarea. Gregory of Nazianzus, however, reports only a little information to his devotees about this little-known Cappadocian martyr. The oration highlights many themes, especially spiritual renewal that comes to humanity (...) from Christ's death and resurrection. Through many biblical quotes, the bishop exhorts all humanity to a spiritual change, creating an oration with a complex and irregular structure that is probably derived from several orations that Gregory of Nazianzus proclaimed in different times and places and were brought together into a single text. (shrink)

: In this article we shall deal with the construction and defense of subjective identity as a topic at the intersection of psychology and anthropology. In this perspective, defense mechanisms are seen as falling along a spectrum that stretches from the individual to the collective level. The individual mind is the sphere of the intrapsychic defenses and the interpersonal maneuvers to which each of us appeals, in the relationship with other people and with one’s own environment, to defend one’s own (...) self-describability and, indissolubly, the solidity of one’s own self-conscious being. At a social and collective level, on the other hand, the individual self-protective structures are supported by cultural interventions that organize and intersubjectively “domesticate” our subjectivity and our feeling of being-there. Keywords: Autobiographical Reasoning; Defense Mechanisms; Grief; Narrative Identity; Ontological Insecurity Meccanismi di difesa: dall’individuale al collettivo Riassunto: L’articolo si occupa di costruzione e difesa dell’identità soggettiva come tema all’intersezione di psicologia e antropologia. In questa prospettiva, i meccanismi di difesa si dispongono lungo uno spettro che dal livello individuale conduce a quello collettivo. La mente individuale è la sfera delle difese intrapsichiche e delle manovre interpersonali a cui ognuno di noi fa ricorso, nella relazione con gli altri e col proprio ambiente, per difendere la propria autodescrivibilità e, inscindibilmente, la solidità del proprio essere autocosciente. Al livello sociale e collettivo, invece, le strutture autoprotettive dell’individuo sono sorrette da interventi culturali che organizzano e “addomesticano” intersoggettivamente la nostra soggettività e il nostro sentirci esistere. Parole chiave: Ragionamento autobiografico; Meccanismi di difesa; Cordoglio; Identità narrativa; Insicurezza ontologica. (shrink)

Questo articolo argomenta in favore della tesi di una collaborazione tra sensi e ragione nella gnoseologia di Empedocle. Il primo difensore di questa tesi, Sesto Empirico, distingueva nel pensiero empedocleo due forme di ragione, una umana e l’altra divina. Viene sostenuta qui l’identificazione della ragione divina menzionata da Sesto con il dio protagonista del fr. 134DK, a cui il suo citatore, Ammonio, attribuisce il nome di Apollo. L’analisi proposta cerca di mostrare in particolare 1) che il dio menzionato nel fr. (...) 134 e il sole della comologia empedoclea conosciuto grazie alla testimonianza di Aezio ; 2) che la costituzione fisica di questo dio solare, immagine luminosa proiettata sulla volta dell’etere, ne fa una figura velata della conoscenza, come relazione necessaria di esperienze sensibili e di contenuti intellettivi. La tradizione pitagorica che identificava il sole con Apollo troverebbe un prolungamento nella divinizzazione empedoclea della ragione. (shrink)

The New Economic Windows Series, derived from Massimo Salzano's ideas and work, incorporates material from textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings that deals with both the theoretical and applied aspects of various sub-disciplines ...

In questo articolo ci proponiamo di portare alla luce i netti confini che separano i concetti di mindreading, introspezione e metacognizione con l’obiettivo di dissipare alcuni fraintendimenti presenti nella letteratura clinica. A tal fine, iniziamo identificando due posizioni principali nell’odierno dibattito filosofico cognitivo sull’introspezione: da un lato le teorie che sostengono che “introspezione” è la denominazione impropria per un processo interpretativo; da un altro lato le teorie che continuano a ritenere che almeno in alcuni casi l’accesso alla propria mente sia (...) diretto e non interpretativo. Dopodiché prendiamo posizione contro le teorie dell’accesso diretto e in favore di una certa versione dell’approccio interpretativista. Infine, da questo approccio ricaviamo alcune linee guida per l’uso della Theory of Mind in neuropsichiatria cognitiva. (shrink)