Bernhard Waldenfels is certainly one of the leading representatives of the contemporary philosophical tradition with a phenomenological orientation. His scientific education, his intellectual background and his very rich range of publications, many of which have been translated into the major languages, characterise him as a significant heir to the great German philosophical tradition, which he has enlivened in creative contact with contemporary thought, of which he is an acknowledged protagonist...

Bernhard Waldenfels is certainly one of the leading representatives of the contemporary philosophical tradition with a phenomenological orientation. His scientific education, his intellectual background and his very rich range of publications, many of which have been translated into the major languages, characterise him as a significant heir to the great German philosophical tradition, which he has enlivened in creative contact with contemporary thought, of which he is an acknowledged protagonist...

In this contribution I will attempt to sketch a phenomenology of dreaming in what appear to be its most important characterisations: for example, a specific (a)temporality, an essential ineffability, its relation to the waking world and a particular causality. In order to do this, I will be guided by two authors – Maria Zambrano and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who seems to be apparently distant but who share a vision of dreaming as a life-world in continuity with the waking world, which (...) is comprehensible only by adopting a non-rational gaze, such as that offered by poetry and myth. The final aim will be to rehabilitate the dreaming experience as a lived one, able to express deep subjective meanings. (shrink)

The primacy of representation, to which – at least according to Paul Ricoeur – Edmund Husserl would have remained faithful, is radically questioned in Emmanuel Levinas’ famous essay on the "ruin of representation" (1959). The phenomenological structure of intentionality, in which “something appears as something”, confirms the need to “break out of the magic circle of representation”. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a detailed analysis of “intentionality”, insofar as the latter appears as characterized by an essential Mehrmeinun. Levinas (...) brings out the overcoming of representation, that is, the abandonment of the latter's claim to subordinate thought to the objective necessity of presence. Within the horizon of presence, the necessity of being-thus-and-not-otherwise overwhelms the sense of the possible, and the actual evidence annihilates the being-able-to-be-otherwise of human experience. Through the analysis of intentionality and its potentiality, it is possible to bring out the transition from a philosophy of the necessary constraints of evidence, linked to the primacy of representation, to a philosophy of the power-able-to-be-otherwise. After all, the ruin of representation is the ruin of the instant or eternity of evidence, relegated into the actuality of consciousness. By subtracting itself from the self-referential necessity of evidence, the ethical Sinngebung evocated by Levinas at the end of his 1959 article connects intentionality to the sense of the possible, making explicit its openness to the future in radical form. (shrink)

The essay aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theoretical and aesthetic interpretation of Claude Debussy's musical work by Vladimir Jankélévitch, while simultaneously delineating how and why the phenomenon of Debussysm emerges as an innovative and revolutionary style, if compared to the previous tradition. The text discusses the potential relationships between philosophical Phenomenology and musical Impressionism, highlighting - also through the concepts of mystery and instantaneity - how the philosopher reads in the composer's music the emergence of a vision (...) of reality centered on the punctuativity of events. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to focus on the double entanglement of the body as an original medium and as a vehicle of technique. It follows Waldenfels’ long course of investigations devoted to these issues. In particular, the author will try to highlight the strong points of his proposal, attempting to critically extend their range, on the one hand, and problematizing certain assumptions that may become the subject of further investigation, on the other. He will focus above all on (...) the question of the bodily self as embedded in and structured by many gestures and practices that are properly technical. Finally, the author will show how the conceptual tools of this phenomenology can be employed in the analysis of some significant contemporary phenomena. (shrink)

The paper aims to analyse the role of Entfremdung in the process of self-awareness. In the Anmerkungen zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität of 1920, Husserl reflects on the Entfremdung of the concrete bodily self, using the alterity or the meeting with the extraneous as a model. The conscious relation of the natural self to its soma (das Physische) is constituted in the context of the experience of the extraneous (das Fremde). The reference to the other than oneself also seems to occur (...) in the transcendental self-reflection of the self, investigated in the late manuscripts on temporality (C- Manuscripts). Firstly, in such manuscripts, the living present (lebendige Gegenwart) is both identity and difference from self, and precisely as a continuous transition from identity to other-than-self, to difference from self, it constitutes the original ground of the transcendental ego. Secondly, it is possible to grasp a correlativity: that between the bodily self-reflection and the temporal self-reflection of the transcendental ego. Both are based on the opposition and mediation of subjective and objective. Following this path, it can be said that in the reflections on original temporality, the dynamics of bodily self-reflection are iterated: it is no coincidence that in the C Manuscripts Husserl designates the temporal Ego objectified in self-reflection as Non-Ego. Even in the case of the original temporal self-reflexivity, it is otherness that mediates the relation to the self, an otherness that is not identified with but connected to the transcendental body of others. (shrink)

In the following paper, we will focus in particular on the research and reflections carried out by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who offers us a useful perspective to radically rethink the conceptualisation that, through a millenary movement, has led our Western culture, represented by what he calls the Moderns (borrowing an expression from Bruno Latour), to objectify the natural environment and to deploy it as a separate and unmanageable entity to be dominated.

The question I intend to address here concerns the ontological status of the Doppelgänger (the Double). “Who” is the Double? How is it connected to our lives, and to other lives? I would like to describe, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the ambiguity of this figure, which has been interpreted in art and literature as a copy of the original or as a doubling of the self. Drawing on Waldenfels’s reflections on the experience of the alien, I will try to show (...) that the intrinsic ambiguity of the Doppelgänger is rooted in an ambiguity that is even more original than that of the Double: the ambiguity of our own life, which is always intertwined with that of others, with what is alien. What makes us to some extent radically alien even to ourselves and, precisely for this reason, “founded” on our very “groundlessness” is our relational, contextual or responsive freedom. (shrink)

In a collection of essays published in the 1970s under the title Vernunft in die Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, Gadamer confronts developments in analytical epistemology, arguing about epistemology from a hermeneutical point of view. Relations between the two traditions remain difficult. Paolo Parrini was among the few who opened to a real dialogue, neither superficial nor formal. He considered the hermeneutical tradition from an epistemological point of view, finding many connections via a third view between metaphysical realism and strong relativism. This (...) theoretically dense and challenging perspective was expressed in two essays – “Ermeneutica ed epistemologia” (1998) and “Ermeneutica ed epistemologia 2: Heidegger, Kant e la verità” (2011). Parrini focused on the concept of Offenheit der Erfahrung in Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode and, later, on Heidegger’s theory of truth as alètheia. In this paper the author argues that original results of Parrini’s research confirm the fruitfulness of the encounter between hermeneutics and epistemology. He tries at the same time to identify some friction points and theoretical constraints, for further comparative development, in theory of language and theory of history, on which Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics lies. The first tends to eliminate any distance between experience and language; the second presents conflicting aspects about identity conditions of past events, as investigated in history. To become fully productive, the dialogue between epistemological and hermeneutical traditions will be able to face a deep revision about these topics. (shrink)

Intergenerational justice represents a crucial theme in the on-going debate in ethics, politics and law. In what follows, I would like to show that a determined phenomenological perspective drawing from the motive of alterity can shed new light on such a topic. Importantly, my concern will be to display how this approach can provide a thorough justificatory underpinning for a responsibility towards future generations, while denouncing the main shortcomings that mainstream approaches reveal when dealing with this issue.

To establish what time is, as in Plato’s iconic definition (“moving image of eternity”, Timaeus 37d), one often has to emphasize its relation to what time is not. Time seems to be defined dialectically, in terms of what is not eternal, not extra-temporal, etc. Husserl’s phenomenology as well shows how experience involves several borderline forms of time. But these sui generis forms of timelessness are for Husserl as many modes of time, they are variations of the same constituent temporality. Time (...) thus presents its dialectical counterparts within itself, rather than being metaphysically drawn ex nihilo from eternity. Allzeitlichkeit, for example, is the capacity of idealities to be in any time; Überzeitlichkeit is the property of the I to function as the focus of appearance in any possible living experience; Zugleichkeit is the proper mode of the a priori of correlation, i.e. the fact that the intertwined processes of Objektivierung and Subjektivierung occur at the same time; Urzeitigung and Selbstzeitigung describe the primordial dimension of the absolute flow of consciousness (Urprozess); finally, Simultaneität and Gleichzeitigkeit refer respectively to the system of sedimented sense (secondary passivity) and to the modality of its reactivation. All these boundary forms do not negate time, but entertain a constitutive relationship with its becoming. Overall, then, Husserl’s view is that of a pluralistic and polyhedric unity of time. (shrink)

In the following paper, we will focus in particular on the research and reflections carried out by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who offers us a useful perspective to radically rethink the conceptualisation that, through a millenary movement, has led our Western culture, represented by what he calls the Moderns (borrowing an expression from Bruno Latour), to objectify the natural environment and to deploy it as a separate and unmanageable entity to be dominated.

The compatibility between the phenomenological method and the subject of the unconscious has long been called into question, not only by external critics but also by authors whose theoretical background had been shaped precisely by their confrontation with Husserl’s phenomenology. To date, the evolution of Husserlian philology, on the one hand, has notably softened such stance, testifying to how the father of phenomenology himself directly and repeatedly grappled with this problem. On the other hand, however, there seem to be intrinsic (...) aspects to the notion of phenomenology as such that would lead to underestimate its potential, outright excluding concepts or entire realms of experience, such as that gathered under the title of the unconscious. In this article, we intend to revisit certain moments in Husserl's work from which it becomes clear that not only is phenomenology capable of addressing the problem of the unconscious, but above all it proves to be particularly effective in accounting for it, providing important methodological indications for its analytical framing. In the concluding section, we will finally touch upon some possible avenues for a phenomenological investigation of the unconscious, differentiated by the assumption of distinct exemplary phenomena as guiding thread (Leitfaden) of the analysis. (shrink)

Through a comparison of the phenomenological motif of the alien and the psychoanalytic motif of the unconscious, a critique is advanced against Cartesian dualism, which recurs today in the natural sciences and in the split of the contemporary individual, divided between spirit and nature, the proper world and the alien world, the inner sphere and the outer sphere. It is a matter of thinking of an original subtraction, an absent presence that begins with ourselves, in a slippage that achieves no (...) synthesis. (shrink)

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

Living corporeity is the intermediate element between nature and culture, which must be thought of as a reciprocal interconnection, since as corporeal beings we always move on a threshold. In the reflection of the bodily self, a doubling between the living body as a functioning subject and as a material object is revealed; after all, even one's own body sometimes takes on the features of a foreign body, as is the case in the experience of illness. In the technical instrument, (...) the body is prolonged and this highlights the connection between the technique of the thing and the technique of the self; however, despite the gradual autonomisation of the technical element from the living corporeity, there remains what escapes calculation and looms large in the subtraction of the alien. (shrink)

Through a comparison of the phenomenological motif of the alien and the psychoanalytic motif of the unconscious, a critique is advanced against Cartesian dualism, which recurs today in the natural sciences and in the split of the contemporary individual, divided between spirit and nature, the proper world and the alien world, the inner sphere and the outer sphere. It is a matter of thinking of an original subtraction, an absent presence that begins with ourselves, in a slippage that achieves no (...) synthesis. (shrink)

Living corporeity is the intermediate element between nature and culture, which must be thought of as a reciprocal interconnection, since as corporeal beings we always move on a threshold. In the reflection of the bodily self, a doubling between the living body as a functioning subject and as a material object is revealed; after all, even one's own body sometimes takes on the features of a foreign body, as is the case in the experience of illness. In the technical instrument, (...) the body is prolonged and this highlights the connection between the technique of the thing and the technique of the self; however, despite the gradual autonomisation of the technical element from the living corporeity, there remains what escapes calculation and looms large in the subtraction of the alien. (shrink)

An ethical epoché is required to leave the terrain of a self-evident morality and question its origin. In particular, four fundamental motifs of the ethical dimension are identified: pathos, to be thematised as an alternative to the persistent activist unilateralism; response, which always involves body and soul; diastasis with its stumbles and subtractions; and finally coaffection, in which the social dimension of experience is announced. Ethical behaviour feeds on the magma of pathos, which in turn would be blind and directionless (...) without any ethos. (shrink)

In recent decades, phenomenology and hermeneutical phenomenology have taken the lead in addressing the question of personal identity through the inquiry of “who are you?”. However, this lead has questionable aspects in capturing the relationality between self, others, and the surrounding world, characterized by its ever-changing state. To understand personal identity in its ever-changing state of becoming, the primary focus of this paper is twofold: firstly, exploring how to reconcile these complex relations into a unified conception of personal identity by (...) following Husserl’s notion of “indeterminate determinacy” and his theory of variation, and secondly, considering the limitations of defining this unity as an “autobiography or biography" in accordance with Arendt’s notion of a "life-story". In the final analyses the notion of life-story will be revised together with Waldenfels’s analyses on “radical alien” and Sözer’s “in-between”. This will prompt a reconsideration of personal identity as a process, leading to a genetic phenomenological perspective that recognizes the “indeterminacy of the self”. (shrink)

In the last century, Goffman defined prisons as places of residence and work for groups of people who share a common predicament, spending part of their lives under a closed regime, whose all-embracing nature is manifested in the blocking of social exchange and any relations with the outside world (Goffman 1961: 11). Comprehensive, all-encompassing institutions where, from a Foucauldian perspective, a strong bureaucratic organisation manages mass groups of individuals, exerting strict control over them to the point of shaping their actions, (...) relationships and very identity; a disciplinary and punitive regime, structured to produce a specific kind of citizen (Foucault 1975: 135). This is a clear but far too rigid an analysis to reflect what is today the submerged, we might say hidden, reality of Italian and international prisons. In order to understand the experience of imprisonment today, it is more helpful to refer to places of confinement (Pandolfino 2022), where it is necessary to look not only at institutions or places, but also at the relations between sites, practices, social relations and subjective states of mind (Jefferson 2014: 49)... (shrink)

The great challenge of prison is the repair function and not only towards those who have suffered the damage, but also for the recluse. The article focuses on the penitentiary environment as a place for training and learning through the social library: a space in prison free, participated, co-built and attentive to the needs of differences.

It is a well-known fact that besides having an indispensable nutritional function, food also has an important cultural value. Methods to transform and make use of food have their origins in social contexts and contribute to generating cultural processes and forms of life. According to this view, food is also a cultural invention which has come to influence man’s ways of being and living, as well as the manner in which man relates to others, the world and the divine...

Vol. 7, n. 2, December 2023 (special issue).

The variability, the fugacity, the subjectivity and "privacy" of taste sensations, their excessive involvement with corporeality, appetites, pleasure, emotions and affectivity, their proximal character, their instability and, last but not least, the difficult verbal translatability of flavors, are the factors that have determined the misrecognition of taste, fueling the prejudice on its unreliability from the point of view of knowledge. Despite its cognitive devaluation, the sense housed in the mouth and responsible for the choice of foods, the recognition and evaluation (...) of the flavors of food and drinks, in our daily life it nevertheless manages to establish such a perfect balance between body and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, need and desire, pleasure and knowledge, intimacy and sociability, to motivate his election as a topic of philosophical interest. Therefore, dealing with sensoriality starting from the “minor” senses, the most rooted in bodily experience, also means trying to show the interweaving of bodily experience, cognition and subjective dimension from an embodied perspective. And in the specific case of taste, it means re-evaluating the body through the daily experience of eating. (shrink)

Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was characterized by extreme violence. In his course at the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société (1974/1975), M. Foucault has argued that the birth of the modern state, through the juridico-political theory of sovereignty, and Hobbes-style contractualism and Leviathan, falsely closed the problem. He offers an alternative based on counter-history, but disdains many of Montaigne 's materials that could reinforce his thesis.

Starting from the impossible question “what is music?”, the paper attempts to circumscribe its meaning through different epistemological strategies: historical, empirical, objective. An attempt is made to reflect on the character of intangibility and sensoriality of musical experience that reveals its antinomic essence. Musical experience appears stretched between ineffable and exact, useless and necessary. The second part of the work is dedicated to the observation of the music phenomenon through the neuroscientific perspective.

The work is interwoven around the opportunity of empowerment that the return of a library offers to prisoners of the V. Madia prison in Barcelona Pozzo di Gotto. A library is an ideal and concrete space where one can discover themself and others. It is a place where you can practice freedom and work for it. It is an opportunity to give content to the “empty time” in which one is forced, when an impediment hinders the free enjoyment of oneself. (...) To articulate this idea the condition of loss of freedom, stress and fragility, in which the inmates, placed in correspondence with the situation of segregation, illiteracy, violence and loss of human rights that afflicts Iranian women are considered. In the Nafisi Room, as we read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, confronting readings of literary works censored by the regime, young women of Tehran start a process of resilience and reaffirmation of themselves through a practice of reading, that similarly and for the same purposes will be able to make women and men detained, go to the library now functioning in Madia prison. (shrink)

Vittorio Madia (1895-1954) was the director of the Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (Sicily) criminal asylum from 1929 to 1954 and an important figure in the history of Italian psychiatry. He studied Criminal Anthropology and Lombrosian Theory in Naples, which led him to develop a rehabilitation model based on freedom and work and the introduction of Occupational Therapy. His tenure in the asylum was characterised by methodological and organizational precision, vision of the potential of the institute for rehabilitation and treatment, and (...) individual treatment for the inmates; in just a few years, under his direction the criminal asylum in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto became unrivalled for excellence in Italy and was acknowledged as being as well run as similar institutions in the United States of America and in Europe. His son Aldo (1920-2005) worked closely with his father and succeeded him as director of the asylum, continuing his father’s work to further the inmates’ moral and psychic rehabilitation. This narrative review describes Vittorio Madia’s personal and professional career in caring for the criminally insane. (shrink)

In this contribution, the authors give us a brief analysis of the legislative landscape that marked the transition from the Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals to the Articulations for the Protection of Mental Health and the Residences for the Execution of Security Measures; the focus is on the health area in the regional context (Sicily) with specific reference to the Vittorio Madia prison in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze religious food prescriptions and avoidances, to show, through a cross-cultural and comparative approach, the inner reason underlying such a wide range of different biases and rules sedimented through millennia of religious practices. Since food also transmits meanings, any food performs a semiotic power and shows how religious identities are embedded in everyday life. As a result, "we are what we eat," not only organically but in terms of beliefs and representations. For these (...) reasons, food often functions as an identity marker that traces invisible borders between an in-group of people sharing the same religious identity or background, and an out-group of people with different identities. Therefore, in acquiring personal or social identity inside a larger community, food plays a relevant part in linking cultivation, culture, and worship, which is why this project highlights the relationship between religious food prescriptions and identity. People connect to their religious group through food patterns, and religious rules concerning food are often used to retain cultic and cultural identity. ultuale e culturale. (shrink)

A book written in 1938 by a German jurist, philosopher and essayist, Walter Schubart, emerges from a tragic past that we deem distant, and forces us, more than eighty years later, to question problematically our present day. The profound contradictions of that time have not been resolved, and the same spectres for the same and new nightmares play on the scene. The text is reread and interpreted to bring out what were for Schubart the crucial junctures of the conflict not (...) only between Russia and Europe but also between West and East, in search of a possible synthesis glimpsed by the author himself when in the conclusion he uses a metaphor: Europe is the vat, Russia the wine, each needs the other. The current geopolitical context is certainly not moving in that direction. But have other perspectives or other ways of interpreting such conflicts and thus other implicit solutions presented themselves between those two worlds? Poignant from this point of view may be the intense work of Pavel Florensky – considered only very marginally by Schubart. In the interweavings of theology, philosophy, science, linguistics and art, Florensky opens up to a profound reworking of both Western and Eastern culture, showing that the conflict can be recomposed on the scene by getting rid of spectres. (shrink)

The aim of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of bibliotherapy in rehabilitation settings. The term bibliotherapy, coined in the 1930’s by the psychiatrist William Menninger, conveys the importance of reading as a tool for cultural promotion and growth, as a means through which to acquire knowledge, enhance one's cognitive and emotional abilities, develop strategies for managing discomfort, as well as a psychoeducational and cognitive technique in the psychotherapeutic field. A study carried out on Pubmed showed that recent (...) research on bibliotherapy, in particular experimental research, would be lacking and requires a humanistic medical approach, drawing on the knowledge and methods of psychology and cognitive literary studies, as well as clinical disciplines to broaden our understanding of how the dynamic processes of interpretation mediate between the textual and characteristic structures of mental health and illness. This narrative review was conducted on PubMed database and used two key terms “Bibliotherapy” AND “rehabilitation” AND “prison”. Studies in line with this specific issue were included. The search of PubMed database provided a total of 470 items recruited online; of these 464 studies were excluded according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. After the screening, a total of 6 studies assessing the bibliotherapy in rehabilitation setting, met the inclusion criteria and were included in the narrative review. Bibliotherapy as a self-help approach also in psychotherapeutic treatments can activate the desire to seek changes in attitudes and behaviour, to acquire knowledge of symptoms, and the value of self-care. A psychological intervention self-administered through ACT bibliotherapy with minimal therapeutic support can improve the physical and emotional functioning of adults with chronic pain. If studies report the efficacy of parent-mediated bibliotherapy in situations of childhood anxiety, nocturnal fears, specific phobias, in adolescence chatbot-delivered self-help depression intervention was proven to be superior to the minimal level of bibliotherapy in terms of reduction on depression and anxiety. Bibliotherapy interventions may be helpful to fight against weight gain and potentially facilitate smoking cessation. (shrink)

In The pillar and ground of the truth, Pavel Florensky meditates on the anthropological potential of the mysticism of the heart as opposed to false mysticisms that generate a fragmented and distorted experience of life. The mysticism of the heart in one of its highest figures that arises in the sphere of christian asceticism points instead to the integration of the person, to a transfiguration of his perception by which he enters into relationship with a frequency of the real that (...) resembles a sort of entrance to Paradise. Florensky's thought is a challenge to the lifestyle imposed on us by contemporary culture, which is related to those false mysticisms because of its logic centered on the will to control, the maximization of instrumental efficiency, dispersion, consumption, which causes the degradation of human life in isolation and the loss of enthusiasm for existence. (shrink)

This article traces Florensky’s intellectual biography. The author underlines that, more than his numerous scientific, philosophical, theological, mystical works, his most important and imperishable message is the heroic elevation of his Christian testimony in the gulag. Florensky transfigures the “night” with the achievement of a higher spiritual dimension, which he calls “the art of gratuitousness”, of the pure disinterested gift of oneself to God and others, that gratuitousness which is synonymous with grace and beauty.

The essay intends to propose a reflection on the philosophical writing and style discussing Emil Cioran's thought, based mainly on the conversations and interviews in which the Franco-Romanian philosopher offered notable interpretative keys on this theme. With this contribution we attempt to articulate philosophical writing as a lógos which, starting from sensation, from life in the most direct way in which it is perceived, expresses existence, with the aim of freeing it from the evils that grip it.

The psychiatric question, the history of insanity, and psychiatric power have historical connections to the construction of the state and society around the principles of inclusion and exclusion. Asylum is an institution whose dominant feature has been far more exclusion than care. In Italy, starting with the Italian experience led by Basaglia in Gorizia in the early 1960s, a radical critique of psychiatry as an ideology of social control has been structured. This cycle of anti-institutional struggles, and the following debate, (...) culminated in the passing of Law 180. In this context, the discussion on overcoming the judicial asylum occupied a wide space. The paper examines some of the issues around which the critique of the criminal asylum has been developed and intertwined with the struggle against the asylum. (shrink)

In these pages the author deals with the genesis of AttraversaMenti. The touching movie After this exile was born from the project Cinema, soul shape. The film was filmed in the Vittorio Madia intramural library rooms during the renovation. The restoration is, here, as background of important cues of choral and personal reflection.

In this contribution, the former Director of the last Criminal Asylum to close its doors, gives us a brief overview of his experience. He argues the most significant breakup moments, without forgetting the proposals and suggestions for future improvements. Finally, he gives us an original document, from the V. Madia historical archive. This is a life in the asylum portrait.

This paper analyses the main concepts of Florensky's technical works – namely his studies on topology and his engineering work at Glavelektro and at the Technical Encyclopedia – within the framework of an allegedly 'new and future' conception of the world. The aim is to show that not only is Florensky's technical-scientific work detachable from his metaphysics, but that it is possible to identify the theoretical and methodological features of an original scientific approach and a transversal model of rationality capable (...) of overcoming the rigid demarcations between nature and culture. Such science shall contain both an Ars inveniendi and a morphology of particularities. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a hermeneutic reading of the beginning of the first letter entitled Los dos mundos in the book La Columna y el Fundamento de la Verdad. I consider this text important,as it offers us the epistemological principles that will guide Florensky's investigation. I understand that Florensky proposes a phenomenology, in which the phenomenological reduction is the Cross of Christ. A perspective that brings it closer to the hesychast tradition, which considers the purification of the heart through (...) the Cross, the path to the visit of the Uncreated Light, as a path towards theosis. In the case of Florensky, we have a similar path to achieving a mystical modality of knowledge, in which the intuitive and discursive register are combined in a fertile and rigorous way. (shrink)

This essay is based on selected medical records from Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto’s criminal asylum, concerning cases of uxoricide. Through the analysis of these medical records and the related judicial information, the article focuses on the contexts in which gender-based violence took place, in order to reconstruct the voices and proofs of the social actors involved. It furthermore identifies the “tolerance limit” of gender-based violence, and how this could fluctuate and be subjected to bargaining. The voices and anxieties of the (...) men involved, and the study of these medical surveys stimulate a reflection, from a relational and performative perspective, on the connection between masculinity and gender-based violence. By proposing a consideration on the fine line between pathological and criminal uxoricide violence, the essay underlines how uxoricide seems to be linked to a male identity that is sometimes built on power relationships. (shrink)

The paper investigates the salient features of Florensky's "concrete metaphysics" and the interpretative and forecasting framework he draws from it to prefigure the features of future science. The intent is to reconstruct, through a documented analysis based on the texts, his attitude towards Europe and the western world, certainly characterised by a critical confrontation, based on the perception and denunciation of the crisis of the hegemonic models of rationality and civilisation in their cultures, but anything hostile and antagonistic, and never (...) evaluated by him as foreign realities, neither as regards their destiny, nor that of Russia, Christianity and philosophical and scientific thought in general. (shrink)

The thought of P.A. Florensky is a peculiar expression of Russian philosophy and, more generally, of Russian cultural identity. At the same time, it can nevertheless be regarded as a legitimate heir to the cultural tradition which from its powerful Ionian roots unfolds through the peaks and abysses of Western philosophy stricto sensu, up to the ultimate crises of contemporary thought...

This extract recounts the experience of the current Vittorio Madia Prison director: the passion, the desire to improve and teamwork. Yet also, the concern for future challenges.

The Russian thinker Florensky and the French philosopher Weil devoted much space in their writings to the crisis of the West. The article highlights the many convergences that exist between their explanations of the reasons for this state of things, but also between their proposals for a solution based on the analysis of what they both consider to be the foundation stone of Western culture: ancient Greece, specifically its culture and thought imbued with an arcane religious-mystical tradition, the best representative (...) of which is Plato. Florensky and Weil agree that the renewal of Western culture should consist in rediscovering its ancient roots and, simultaneously, in reappropriating that which founds the culture and thought of ancient Greece: the gaze on the transcendent, that is, on that reality of which the real (the world, life, etc.) is an ontological symbol. (shrink)

The present paper returns the results of a project conducted in the “Germana Stefanini” Women's Prison in Rome. The initiative has had various editions with the aim of enhancing the benefits of books and reading in the prison context to promote paths of empowerment and redemption. The use of special texts (silent books or wordless picture books) and the methodological choices allowed the participants to experience a time of wonder and to consider beauty in all its forms as a resource (...) for redefining their own identity. The space of punishment has thus been transformed into a valuable opportunity for learning outside the homologating and depersonalising logic of the disciplinary device, also in contrast with the stereotypes that still condition the biographies of many women. (shrink)