The article connects the topic of health in Nietzsche’s thought with the perspective that emerges from some novels of Theodor Fontane, by leaning on a close interaction between philosophy and literature. It is shown that two of Fontane’s characters, Victoire von Carayon from the novel Schach von Wuthenow and Waldemar von Haldern from the novel Stine, embody and depict specific Nietzschean ideas concerning the relationship between the experience of illness and the development of a higher cognitive faculty. How could be (...) thought the latter? It is a greater awareness of oneself, one’s feelings and needs, and a better intuitive capacity. Illness is seen, therefore, not as a mere negative, i.e., as something simply disabling, but rather as a challenge for deeper self-knowledge and empowerment. The concepts of health and illness thus end up flowing into each other, since health cannot be isolated from illness, which acquires a new meaning. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s life and thinking have been deeply influenced by the experience of illness and the related struggle to health, in a way that goes far beyond the very well-known episode of his mental breakdown. In the first part of this paper the history of the reception of the topic is reconsidered, focusing on the initial, “moral” interpretation of health and illness in Nietzsche, on the later stances of Thomas Mann and Georges Canguilhelm, the former offering a psychological perspective, the latter (...) a physiological one, and ending with an overview of newer studies on the question. The second part deals with Nietzsche’s understanding of human finitude, suffering and death, and contrasts it with post-humanist and trans-humanist assumptions. Health in Nietzsche is not standardized; it’s a result of self-cultivation, that is, of the full development of one’s potenBal. In the end an idea of health as a dynamic balance is developed, that also draws oh Gadamer’s reflections on the art of medicine and on the practical dimension of human experience. (shrink)

Nietzsche announces his intentions to publish a “physiology of aesthetics”, namely a naturalistic explanation for how aesthetic judgements are grounded in the physiology of both the one experiencing the work, and the creator of it. But as well as the physiological reduction of aesthetic judgements, Nietzsche in many places across his oeuvre frames the apparatus of physiology, especially the prescriptive dimension of self-cultivation, in terms amenable to being treated as ‘aesthetic’. The first section will mount a (re-) defense of the (...) use of aestheticized language for discussing Nietzschean self-cultivation. The second section demonstrates an aesthetic evaluation of capacities that make possible the acquisition and removal of instinctual components, ultimately arguing for Nietzsche’s qualified indeterminism regarding the capacity for self-cultivation. The third section will assess the pres- ence of another aesthetic measure, this time in terms of envisaging one’s psycho-physiology by reference to an external spectacle. The final section discusses metaethical questions stemming from Nietzsche’s prescriptive language regarding the aestheticization of our physiology. (shrink)

The concept of “health”, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, is not opposed to that of disease but incorporates it within itself. The paper aims to show how being in “good health” has, according to Nietzsche, a physiological significance that is intimately connected to aesthetics. Richard Wagner’s music is the iconic example of how rhythm from medicine can become poison and lead a body to décadence. Even in some patients with neurological diseases, musical rhythm can function as medicine, which does not work equally (...) for everyone but according to individual, embodied laws. (shrink)

In 1886, Nietzsche felt the need to exercise a retrospective look at the works he had written up to that point. Hence, the writing of a series of prefaces (Vorreden). They can be considered and read as a thematically unified textual body. Rereading them as a unified work allows us to recognise their value as an “auto-pathobiography”. In it, the concepts of health and illness occupy a central position that Nietzschean research has long been questioning. Nevertheless, in reflecting on health (...) and illness, in the Vorreden, Nietzsche also prepares the fundamental epistemological move that will enable him to gradually and increasingly shift his speculative focus from the autoanalytical and biographical to the genealogical plane and authorise him to look at his main object of research, the moral phenomenon, as no other thinker had done before. (shrink)

In the age of Anthropocene, can aesthetics propose a not prevaricating behavioural model towards nature, leading to a new conception of humanity based on our being moved by nature? In this article, we will try to answer this question, exploring how some exponents of contemporary Environmental Aesthetics have examined the significance of human emotional responses to nature. Starting from the assumption that Kant defines the sublime as a motion of the soul, we wonder how aesthetics can reinterpret this concept to (...) affirm not human superiority over nature but his being part of it. To do so, we will turn our attention not only to some exponents of Environmental Aesthetics but also to Schopenhauer's concept of the sublime and the thought of Arne Næss, the father of the Deep Ecology movement. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

Firstly, this contribution proposes to address synthographies – images generated through Text-to-image technologies – by deepening the epistemological shift related to the possibility of transposing the image-creation process from the analogue arts to the notational ones (or, by drawing on Nelson Goodman's terminology, from the “autographic” to the “allographic” forms of art). Secondly, the paper highlights how synthographies can be considered partly autographic and partly allographic, since the linguistic prompts constitute only the notational aspect of the generated images. Furthermore, this (...) contribution argues that the recent critiques around such images, which referenced aspects related to the absence of authorial presence and mechanicality, characterised the history of photography since its beginning. Finally, the contribution explores how the possibility to create synthographies that are almost indistinguishable from photographies easily might further separate the interaction between the detective and the depictive functions to the advantage of the latter, erasing what remains of the visual reliability and documental value of images. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to question the problem of artistic creation as a transfiguration of suffering. We will point out that health is always a state to be looked at with the eyes of a convalescent, and how in particular there can be no artistic creation that is not accompanied by a condition of suffering. Our interpretive key will be the faculty of perceiving nuances, a topic that often appears in Nietzsche’s later writings, and the relationship between the (...) nuance and the affirmative power of art. Finally, we will consider whether the taste for nuance is not itself a sign of a profoundly suffering nature, aristocratically devoted to detachment from all that is grossly general. (shrink)

Throughout the present paper, I propose an analysis of René Magritte’s artwork Les mots et les images (La Révolution surréaliste, 1929) in connection with a reflection on the associated theories he formulated in the handout for his London lecture (1937). Read in reference to selected writings (and in erratic observation with other artworks of his oeuvre), the eighteen propositions of Les mots et les images, along with their development in the 1937 document, might help at investigating the aesthetic principles that (...) guide and characterise Magritte’s reflection around language. In this same regard, in the last part of my article I will focus on Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973) and, particularly, on the distinction between resemblance (ressemblance) and similitude (similitude). These last remarks, I argue, offer the opportunity not only to think about the way in which images and words are related to each other in Magritte’s works, but also to inves- tigate the vital issue of language, which has occupied a crucial place within French thought. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the meaning of the notion of the “uncanny” in Nietzsche’s Birth of tragedy. To read today this work is to encounter a text that has preserved intact the force of its philosophical message: man is such only in the alternance and coexistence of health and illness, Apollonian and Dionysian, art and life. The role of Socrates’ philosophy in Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy, however, needs to be reconsidered. Socrates is also, according to this reading, an (...) “uncanny” figure. This article is dedicated to an analysis of the aesthetical leitmotif of Nietzsche’s philosophy and a comparison between The birth of tragedy and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. Topics are the complex relationship between health and illness and the difference between humankind and mechanical robots or automata. (shrink)

The notion of hyle seems problematic for a phenomenological foundation of experience. For this very reason, its completed invalidity was generally postulated. At the same time, there are many reflections in Husserlian writings that help us understand it better. This paper attempts to show how hyletic experience, by existing in the lived body, triggers in parallel rhythmic, vibrating, and sonorous experiences as bodily experiences. Sounds are experienced by the body before any reflections or conscious experiences of them. In this way, (...) the aporetical instance of hyletic data founds a proposal of resolution in the fundamental corporeal experience of sound. (shrink)

The famous definition of landscape by Joachim Ritter unmistakably names the aesthetic act of construction that makes landscape vision possible: “Landscape is nature that is aesthetically present in the sight for a feeling and sensing observer”. Landscape is an aesthetic construct, in whose act of construction, however, social, cultural, individual and other constitutional factors flow. Following Karl Popper’s 3-world theory, a physical landscape (world 1), an individual landscape (world 2) and a social landscape (world 3) can be distinguished. In each (...) case, aesthetic and other constitutional factors are interconnected in a complex and complicated way. In addition, this situation is aggravated by the fact that different scientific basic positions (essentialism, positivism, constructivism) find their way into corresponding analyses (partly unreflected) and make scientific understanding difficult. Finally, this scientific starting position produces different paradigms, theories and terminology, which are often played off against each other and can lead to unfruitful dissent in science. The lecture counters this with a “neopragmatic” approach that can show that and how different paradigms, theories and conceptualisations can be related to each other in such a way that unfruitful dissent can be avoided and instead the advantages of the scientific plurality of theories, concepts and paradigms can be used and made fruitful for concrete research goals. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to show, first of all, how landscape cannot but stand out on the horizon of a cognitive flux that affects every aspect of our being in the world (or, better said, of our being in the world) world). A special role will be reserved for aesthetic mediation, to be understood as a n act that regulates the epistemic negotiation between what is in the center and what is ”in the surroundings”. In this sense, the (...) work will start from bio cognitive assumptions on the species specific ways in which an organism circumscribes and enriches its world, and will then finally arrive at considerations that should, in our hopes, demonstrate how aisthesis is, in fact, the conceptual category that best lends itself to describing this process, in virtue of the particular gnoseological value it assigns to the se nsitive body and its extension extension. (shrink)

This article aims to overcome the representational conceptions of landscape in or-der to recover its substantive character. Landscape appears as a semantically ambiguous and tensive concept in both conceptualizations, but if the representational approaches draw on the dualisms of modernity (between nature and culture, subject and object, art and sciences) and understands landscape in terms of a spiritual / artistic / visual construction opposed to nature, a substantive approach towards landscape emphasizes the continuity between the natural and the anthropic and, (...) without denying the constructive potential of subjective or cultural perceptions, endows the geographical forms with the capacity to produce meanings, constraints and socio-political options by means of their aesthetic qualities. The article is divided in five paragraphs: the first four discuss different kinds of representational attitude towards landscape elaborated during the XX century (the cognitive, the idealistic, and the critic approach), while in the fifth paragraph I will pin down some elements to build an integrally substantive conception of landscape, opening the path for further research developments. (shrink)

In 1665 Athanasius Kircher published the treatise Mundus Subterraneus, to ex-plore the complex relationships between the visible forms of the landscape and the reasons that produce them. Kircher was peer of Claude Lorrain, who gave a critical contribution in founding landscape as an artistic genre, making indistinguishable its existence as a real place and its representation as a picture. Compared to Kircher, Lorrain had the greatest influence on Western landscape culture. Yet today, thanks to scholars and landscape architecture practitioners, Kircher’s (...) intuition seems effective to describe the contemporary idea of landscape as a performative field, encompassing all living forms, soils and waters, and intangible substances working together, impossible to understand just by the investigation of their visible forms. Today landscape exists because it is perceived and because it works: Lorrain and Kircher have finally met. (shrink)

In ancient Chinese culture, landscape constituted a fundamental element in religious, literary and artistic expressions. This contribution is intended as an imperfect and concise attempt to trace the “guidelines” – influenced above all by Daoist doctrine – of Chinese thought on landscape within the literature and pictorial art of traditional China.

This paper suggests that the understanding of the use and the concept of “landscape” can be facilitated by a comparison with Wittgenstein’s language games and that indeed “landscape” functions in a similar way to language games, understood in their intertwinement with forms of life. On this basis, I proceed to outline three fundamental elements of a pragmatist, anti-essentialist conception of landscape and develop two of them schematically. In conclusion, I reflect on some ramifications and possible developments of the proposed perspective.

This paper distinguishes two components of experience, the subjective and objective, and connects them to the distinction between “individual” and “social” epistemology. These elements, it is then proposed, shape Hume’s approach to knowledge and belief and, by extension, his treatment of taste. The paper con- cludes by distinguishing “philosophical criticism” from “vulgar criticism”; the former reflects Hume’s place in the eighteenth-century “science of man,” while the latter connects him to a tradition that makes aesthetics closer to an art criticism.

The 18th century is the age of aesthetics. This is evidenced not only by the birth of the discipline, but also by the extraordinary production in the field of aesthetic studies, particularly in Germany, England, France, and Italy. David Hume’s Of the standard of taste (1757), a veritable manifesto of aesthetic subjectivism, is also set within this framework. More than two and a half centuries later, how can it be read? In this paper, I will attempt to support a thesis: (...) to identify traces of Hume’s theory of taste in some 20th century authors, in particular Adorno, Jauss, and Dickie. (shrink)

When used with regard to aesthetic inquiries prior to the nineteenth century, the concept of "aesthetic experience" is subjected to the criticism of those who consider its a posteriori application illegitimate. At the same time, it seems undeniable that the concept was already present and developed during the 18th century: in particular, among British empiricists. For David Hume, the concept of experience results for many reasons foundational to his aesthetic reflection, especially when analyzed from the perspective of relation/contrast with the (...) question of aesthetic judgment, alongside with the complex dialectical tension to which it gives rise between subjective aesthetic judgment and objective critical evaluation, individual appreciation and social taste, rational and sentimental reaction. (shrink)

This essay details David Hume’s complex contextualist account of aesthetic properties. Focusing mainly on the essay “Of the standard of taste”, I argue that Hume’s account of aesthetic properties anticipates many points advanced in Kendall Walton’s 1970 essay “Categories of art”, most notably the thesis that proper detection of most aesthetic properties depends on awareness of which nonaesthetic properties are standard, contra-standard, and variable for the relevant category of art. Consequently, they both reject the position we now describe as aesthetic (...) empiricism. Yet there are also distinctive aspects of Hume’s account. Most notably, Hume holds that delicacy of imagination is involved in avoiding prejudice when perceiving nonaesthetic properties. He also proposes that aesthetic terms such as “beauty” and “elegance” capture positively valenced thick concepts because aesthetic properties are necessarily (in part) value properties. (shrink)

In the “Foreword” to the publication in 1739 of the first two parts of the Treatise on _Human Nature_, devoted to the intellect and the passions, Hume promised, “If I am fortunate enough to be successful, I will proceed to examine morality, politics and criticism, an examination that will complete this Treatise on Human Nature”. This essay takes a general look at Hume's aesthetic reflection, highlighting its dominant developments and crucial passages, in an attempt to show how the methodological and (...) gnoseological premises for Humean research on the beautiful were already anticipated in the Treatise project itself. (shrink)

This work aims to scrutiny the concept of “taste” as developed by David Hume. Firstly, it will be highlighted the impossibility of thinking taste neither as a sub- jectivist nor objectivist aesthetic theory; on the contrary, it will be shown, through Agamben’s work, its underlying radical dialectical structure that seeks to unite subject and object. Furthermore, thanks to Deleuze’s enquiry in Hume’s thought, it will be possible to argue that Hume’s theory of art, rather than being a simple consequence of (...) his theory of mind, plays a fundamental role in the whole Humean system, especially in the accounts on history, civilization, and the role of philosophy. (shrink)

In what follows, I shall focus on what may be defined as the engineering of hu- mans from a philosophical perspective. More precisely, I shall reflect upon the way in which our language increasingly changes when we define our relationship with emerging technologies, specifically human digital twins, which, as our tech- nological replica, can serve as privileged standpoints to try to understand the meaning of the shift from using distinguishable words to define humans and technologies (for instance, when we happen (...) to talk about our health in terms of self-perception) to using indistinguishable words to define humans and technol- ogies (for instance, when we happen to talk about our health in terms of human digital twins’ diagnoses and prognoses). The change of our language shows a kind of optimisation that is taken to the extreme, starting with the optimisation of human bodies’ performances: the more engineered humans are (in that they identify their purpose not with feeling good, for instance, but with preforming in faster and more profitable ways), the better they are (in that they measure themselves not against typically human values, such as feeling good, for in- stance, but against typically engineering values, such as efficiency). But a re- markable paradox emerges, whose meaning shall be the core of my philosophical reflection: the more humans work on optimising themselves, the more they (par- adoxically) work on moving optimisation from themselves, i.e. their capabilities as autonomous humans (starting with self-perception), to technologies, i.e. ways of engineering, specifically automating, themselves. (shrink)

The paper traces some of Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the subject of thought and philosophical activity, focusing especially on the third chapter of one of his main works, Difference and repetition (1968). Following the general structure of the chapter, the paper first analyses the concept of “Image of thought”, which describes the tendency of thought itself to represent its own functioning, and the risks that the Image imply, since it chains the activity of thought to old sedentary habits and its (...) ordinary functioning. Secondly, the paper examines Deleuze’s original proposal of a “thought without image”, a thought whose conditions are not predetermined and that therefore must recreate itself each time. Deleuze arrives at this conception through questioning the classical notion of truth and revisiting Kant’s theory of transcendental knowledge. (shrink)

Is it possible that children experience something we could judge as the sublime? Some pivotal conjectures have been elicited to positively answer these questions; however, this general topic still stands in need of fuller theoretical and empirical insights. Since taking up this challenge may have important implications in the ever-expanding field of aesthetic education, in this article I will give a philosophical account of the experience of the sublime in 8-10 children, identifying both its plau- sible components and its markers, (...) which opens up future empirical inquiries. (shrink)