En Italie, bien que le secteur masculin se soit continuellement développé (en atteignant son point d’orgue avec le fascisme), l’éducation physique féminine a rencontré des difficultés à être mise en œuvre dans un pays profondément pénétré de traditionalisme, de religiosité et de misogynie. Jusqu’à l’évènement de la révolution fasciste, a plupart des Italiens croyaient à l’infériorité physique et mentale des femmes et les pionnières du sport féminin étaient ridiculisées ou perçues avec suspicion. Le régime mussolinien a promu l’émancipation sociale des (...) Italiennes à contrecœur grâce à un programme d’activités physiques extensif et fortement organisé. Dans ces années, un corps féminin bien entraîné n’était pas seulement une forme d’expression de la modernité fasciste, mais aussi un moyen essentiel d’accroître aussi bien la démographie que la santé de la population. Les initiatives sportives féminines étaient également considérées comme une bonne manière d’afficher aux yeux du monde l’image d’une nation forte peuplée de citoyens physiquement et moralement robustes. Alors que l’esthétique du corps mâle idéal était clairement incarnée par Mussolini – l’exemple vivant de la virilité athlétique fasciste – le modèle idéal de féminité fasciste était moins figé dans la mesure où il a connu plusieurs transformations résultant de conceptions contradictoires et d’options politiques différentes. (shrink)

Malebranche and the Search after Lost Identity. Legacy and Uncertainty of His Philosophy between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Starting from the Œuvres complètes edited by Robinet, the article summarizes the vicissitudes through which the French historical scholarship with its leading figure Victor Cousin have restored the imagine and the correspondence of Malebranche, beginning with the dissemination of the original documents, conserved throughout the eighteenth century by P. Lelong, P. André, and finally P. Adry. In spite of his great historical (...) contribution, the French scholarship generally stressed an inadequate assessment of this philosophy, sharply suspected of spinozism, a judgment inherited by the handbooks of the history of philosophy edited between the XIX and the XX Century, as proved by the case of Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie by Überweg. The article concludes with three minimalist but creative readings of Malebranche by Proust, Heisenberg, Dalì. (shrink)

In the same year that, just a few days before his death, Locke was penning instructions to for the publication of some of his unprinted works, in particular of the Paraphrases on the Epistles of Saint Paul, a book entitled The Two Covenants of God with Mankind was published in London. The author, Thomas Taylor, had been for some time a staunch supporter of the thought and work of Malebranche, to whom the subtitle made explicit reference. It was during his (...) studies at Oxford that Taylor had begun to approach Malebranche’s thought, very probably through John Norris his chief English mentor. Indeed, Taylor referred to Norris in the notice To the Reader in his work, both explicitly as—“one who best understands [Malebranche]”—and by reutilising the encomiastic optical and astronomical metaphors with which Norris introduced the French philosopher at the beginning of The Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. Also traceable to the authority of Norris was Taylor’s eulogy of the Recherche de la vérité—“a Book that is alone a Library”—that he had translated 10 years earlier, which, along with the almost contemporary translation by Richard Sault, rendered Malebranche’s most influential work accessible to English readers. Taylor’s translation can be set within the context of Locke’s earliest stances regarding the theory of ideas of Malebranche and Norris, the principal documentation of which was to be found in Of Seeing all Things in God, another of the unpublished works mentioned by Locke in the letter to Peter King. King did indeed publish it in the Posthumous Works, albeit without the polemical initial paragraphs directed against Norris, whereas the editorial history of the Paraphrases was to be different. (shrink)