Michel Serres developed a strong core of his philosophical practice around the logic of parasitism. To illustrate this, I propose a bipartite reflection that plays on the external-internal relationship. In the first part I follow Serres in his reflection on the dynamic and unstable relationship between parasitism and symbiosis. The biological and ecological dimension of parasitism occurs in the relationship between viruses, humans and reservoirs. Serres tries to make explicit a parasitic function, irreducible in a single language, which allows to (...) relate the anthropological and sociological characteristics of the parasite to the biological and ecological dynamics. According to Serres, love, humility and a sense of limitation are the global virtues that humanity willhave to rediscover to transform parasitism into symbiosis, rewriting, after Rousseau, a new Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. In the second part I put in perspective an extraordinarily global example of parasitism of our times: the spread of the Covid-19 virus in the context of the spillove. (shrink)

The internet presents not just opportunities but also risks that range, to name a few, from online abuse and misinformation to the polarisation of public debate. Given the increasingly digital nature of our societies, these risks make it essential for users to learn how to wisely use digital technologies as part of a more holistic approach to promoting human flourishing. However, insofar as they are exacerbated by both the affordances and the political economy of the internet, this article argues that (...) a new understanding of wisdom that is germane to the digital age is needed. As a result, we propose a framework for conceptualising what we call cyber-wisdom, and how this can be cultivated via formal education, in ways that are grounded in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and that build on three prominent existing models of wisdom. The framework, according to which cyber-wisdom is crucial to navigating online risks and opportunities through the deployment of character virtues necessary for flourishing online, suggests that cyber-wisdom consists of four components: cyber-wisdom literacy, cyber-wisdom reasoning, cyber-wisdom self-reflection, cyber-wisdom motivation. Unlike the models on which it builds, the framework accounts for the specificity of the digital age and is both conceptual and practical. On the one hand, each component has conceptual implications for what it means to be wise in the digital age. On the other hand, informed by character education literature and practice, it has practical implications for how to cultivate cyber-wisdom in the classroom through teaching methods that match its different components. (shrink)

The crisis of subjectivistic anthropocentrism makes a new interpretation of the weird category of the demonic feasible today. The demonic presents itself as the realm of influences, of connections, of the necessary hybridizations. The essay will try to indicate a path that leads to such hybridizations starting from the category of temporality, confronting itself with an active and subjectivistic interpretation, hybridized in the relationship between science and writing, such as that of Gaston Bachelard.

This thesis inquiries into the Giacomo Leopardi's anthropologic and moral reflections, ruling as from the twenty Operette written in the 1824, along an itinerary that leads from the utopia, exemplified in the myth of the Californians, to the disenchantment, remarkable in some Operette and above all in the Scommessa di Prometeo. The origin of that negative anthropological conception in the Leopardi's philosophy happens through a process of lectures and thoughts that is reconstructed in the thesis, divided into three chapters. The (...) research work marks the limit a quo of the anthropologic utopia of the "happy" peoples in the fifty strophe of the Inno ai Patriarchi (July 1822), considered the last significant place of the "mith" of the Californians, and looks at the lectures of the first stay in Roma (17 november 1822 - 3 may 1823), to find out the constitutive elements of the negative anthropology exposed in the Operette. In the first chapter j examine the net of the lectures and the thoughts that flows into the Abbozzo dell'Inno ai Patriarchi and the fifty strophe of the Inno. The second chapter follows the complex way of the lecture of the Barthélemy's Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece and of the Plutarco's Opuscoli morali - particularly of the Discorso di consolazione ad Apollonio -, in the context of the reflections on the human natural condition. The new leopardian vision of the ancient Greece, that recognizes the roots of the tragic Greek thought and consolidates a negative conception of the human condition, synthesized in the sentence "it's better not to be born". The third chapter dwells upon the interpretation of the Prometheus's myth produced by Leopardi, connected with the lecture of the myth present in the Luciano di Samosata's works. La Scommessa di Prometeo is submitted to a complete analysis, both in the direction of the fonts and on the plane of the statement of the contents, that reveals an original torsion of the Promethean tradition and develops in a dynamic of the full anthropologic disenchantment. (shrink)

Il saggio segue la metamorfosi dell’immagine edificante dello spettacolo della natura, metafora della pietade illuminata nell’opera dell’Abate Pluche e segno di un relativismo umanistico e prospettico negli Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes del Fontanelle, fino a circoscrivere lo scenario del Dialogo di un Folletto e di uno Gnomo, che dà luogo a un originalissimo ribaltamento dell’immagine dello spettacolo. Le forme di tale torsione insieme poetica e di pensiero, che coinvolge l’orizzonte del sapere naturalistico leopardiano nella rappresentazione desolata e straniante (...) di una cruda verità cosmica, attestata dalla scienza e dalla filosofia naturale, sono descritte con l’adesione a puntuali riferimenti testuali, nella trama di letture giovanili richiamate da Leopardi nella produzione matura. (shrink)

A forgotten document by the young Leopardi: the Disputatio and its relation to the Dissertazioni filosofiche - In this essay we look at the Disputatio, a forgotten document by the young Leopardi. It consists of a list of sixty questions, thirty written in Latin and thirty in Italian. These were the questions that Leopardi had to answer in his last public examination, held on the 20 July 1812. In the first part, the authors and sources used by Leopardi in the (...) preparation of the exercise will be studied and compared with the text of the Disputatio. The second part is a comparison between the text of the Disputatio and that of the Dissertazioni filosofiche of 1811-1812. This comparison and consideration of the order in which the subjects are presented reveal that the Dissertazioni filosofiche were written when the poet was preparing for the above-mentioned examination, and that in the Disputatio there are thinkers and subjects, such as La Mettrie and Holbach, that were important for the development of Leopardi’s mature philosophy. (shrink)