_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 197 - 208 The movement of New Realism, which in Italy has been launched by Maurizio Ferraris, is conceived explicitly in opposition to Kant. In his defense of the distinction between ontology and epistemology, Ferraris starts from the presupposition that it is Kant himself who is responsible for their confusion because of his transcendental philosophy and its consequent constructionism. In this paper I will defend Kant’s perspective, explaining his reasons, even against Meillasoux’s “speculative (...) realism.” The basic idea is that Kant’s transcendental philosophy requires a new philosophical attitude, which implies a shift from reality to possibility as the fundamental philosophical category, since only possibility enables a critical perspective on reality. (shrink)

Unlike most readings of Plato’s Theaetetus, which concentrate on gnoseology, this paper places it in the debate on commensurable and incommensurable magnitudes that distinguished Greek philosophical and mathematical thought at the beginning of the 4th century BC and in which Theaetetus played a leading role. The argumentation of the dialogue shows clearly how this debate was important for Plato, to the point that the entire dialogue can be considered as an attempt to consider seriously how incommensurability, and its ontological correlate, (...) the concept of dynamis, could elaborate a new form of logos. (shrink)

La traduction n’est pas seulement un problème linguistique mais aussi, et d’abord, un problème d’ordre éthique et politique. Chez les Grecs les présupposés linguistiques de la communauté font de la traduc­tion une opération visant à mettre en évidence les équivalences ou les synonymies, qui sont les fondements de toute conception universaliste du langage. Certaines théories contemporaines de la traduction – notamment celles de Benjamin et d’Ortega y Gasset – permettent en revanche d’en­tendre le processus traductif d’une manière différente : comme (...) un pro­cessus historique de déploiement des différences qui, dans leur totalité, recomposent la langue pure, chez Benjamin ; ou comme un processus où les déséquivalences et l’incommensurabilité entre les langues viennent au premier plan, favorisant l’ouverture vers l’autre et l’étranger, chez Ortega y Gasset. Une telle conception de la traduction nous permet de penser une ontologie différente, dans laquelle le concept de dynamis occupe une posi­tion centrale. (shrink)

In this paper I try to establish a relation between some fundamental concepts of Gadamerian philosophy—namely, the concepts of play, of transmutation into form, and of increase in being—and the concept of truth. The concept of play allows one to conceive the extra-methodical character of truth as an objectivity radically different from that of science: the objectivity of what happens and is thus unrepeatable, absolutely independent of any methodical mastery; the concept of transmutation into form is a theorization of the (...) effectual character of truth; the concept of increase in being shows its nonredundant character, i.e., the idea that truth is more than reality. Truth is eventually conceived as a “transformational concept,” in which ontology, knowledge, and ethics are indissolubly interconnected. (shrink)

Hegel’s conception of becoming can be said to arise from his intense confrontation with the debates of his time on continuous and mathematical infinite, in which also the thesis about time and movement of Aristotle’s Physics converge. According to Hegel, mathematical infinite already includes the true infinite, which is essentially relation. Basing his insights on the Newtonian rather than on the Leibnizian theory of differential calculus, Hegel draws the idea that the quantum exists only as a ratio; as such, however, (...) the quantum sublates itself into the quality. The continuous is for Hegel the concept of this unceasing sublating of the quantity into the quality : as some of Plato’s claims show in the Parmenides, the instant is the limit of this transition into the other. The Hegelian concept of Aufhebung is this operation of “passage to limit”. In it, the process of the quantitative increasing gives rise to a new figure, to something heterogeneous compared with the previous figure, as in the case of the polygon inscribed in a circle, whose sides are multiplied to infinity until it becomes the circle itself. So understood, the becoming – as well as its metaphysical presupposition, i.e.the true infinite – is an unceasing “passage into the other”: the continuous is not a succession of homogeneous entities, but the process of the unceasing differentiation of the real. In this paper, I argue that this conception of the becoming is the presupposition of the process of liberation that, according to Hegel, is immanent to the becoming itself: if the differentiation happens at every instant, the liberation is, correspondently, possible at every instant. (shrink)

This book offers a new and original hypothesis on the origin of modal ontology, whose roots can be traced back to the mathematical debate about incommensurable magnitudes, which forms the implicit background for Plato’s later dialogues and culminates in the definition of being as dynamis in the Sophist. Incommensurable magnitudes – also called dynameis by Theaetetus – are presented as the solution to the problem of non-being and serve as the cornerstone for a philosophy of difference and becoming. This shift (...) also marks the passage to another form of rationality – one not of the measure, but of the mediation. The book argues that the ontology and the rationality which arise out of the discovery of incommensurable constitutes a thread that runs through the entire history of philosophy, one that leads to Kantian transcendentalism and to the philosophies derived from it, such as Hegelianism and philosophical hermeneutics. Readers discover an insightful exchange with some of the most important issues in philosophy, newly reconsidered from the point of view of an ontology of the incommensurable. These issues include the infinite, the continuum, existence, and difference. This text appeals to students and researchers in the fields of ancient philosophy, German idealism, philosophical hermeneutics and the history of mathematics. (shrink)

Plato’s Theaetetus sets the problem of the definition of science; moreover, what there is in question is the problem of the definition in general. Defining means measuring, referring to definite parameters what is initially indefinite. But it is not a case that the dialogue opens with the discussion about the commensurable and incommensurable numbers: the search for what is common to all sciences is the search for their common measure, for the term to which various elements are or can be (...) commensurated. The apories Plato is showing in refuting the Protagorean thesis appear clearly as an objection against the absolute commensurability of all things: each sense is a parameter of a determinate sensible object and then results as quite incommensurable with another sense; a present sensation is incommensurable with a non present one, either past or future; all these facts question the possibility of the definition, for they reduce the knowledge, and the reality, to a set of atomic and quite unrelated elements. In the same way, the other definitions of science are rejected because of their incompleteness. But the negative conclusion of the Theaetetus regarding the definition of science must be assumed in a positive way: every operation of defining constantly presents an excess which belongs to the incommensurability and leaves every definition in a state of incompleteness. Through a comparison with the problem of the commensurable and incommensurable numbers, what is eventually shown is that the Being itself, as a mean between subject and predicate in the proposition, constitutes the diagonal element of every process of definition, irreducible to the elements that come into play. Being is, literally said, the incommensurable. (shrink)

La defensa gadameriana del carácter extra-metódico de la verdad de las ciencias humanas, teorizada en Verdad y método, no es el simple rechazo del método; ella nace de la conciencia de que hay verdades que no pueden ser reducibles a las condiciones del método, porque se refieren a una dimensión ontológica que no se refiere a la repetitividad y a la conmensurabilidad. Tales aspectos de lo real son los acontecimientos contingentes, accidentales, aquellos que definimos como propiamente históricos. En este texto (...) me propongo poner a la luz esta dimensión ontológica, que en Aristóteles está en particular en aquella de la praxis, de la acción humana, buscando mostrar que la necesidad de su tematización está estrechamente ligada a las discusiones lógicas y ontológicas que atravesaron el pensamiento griego después del descubrimiento de las grandezas inconmensurables. La ontología de la praxis es una ontología que toma en consideración aquella “irracionalidad” constituida a partir de lo contingente y lo accidental, a la que corresponde una forma de racionalidad que no es más conmensuradora sino mediadora, representada por la phrónesis Gadamer’s vindication of the extra-methodical feature of truth in the human sciences put forward in Truth and Method does not mean a mere refusal of method: rather, it arises from the awareness that there are truths which are not reducible to the conditions of repeatability and commensurability set up by methodical thinking. In fact, the truths of the human sciences refer to the ontological dimension of the contingent and the accidental, i.e. to the dimension of the historical. In this essay I aim at highlighting this ontological dimension, which for Aristotle is eminently that of the praxis and of human action. I will show that such an ontology is a consequence of the logical and ontological discussions which crisscrossed Greek thought after the discovery of the incommensurable magnitudes. The ontology of praxis is an ontology which takes into account the “irrationality” represented by the contingent, the accidental, to which a new form of rationality corresponds: that of phrónesis. Phrónesis is in fact not a commensurative but a mediative rationality. (shrink)

“Radical understanding” – an expression recalling Quine’s “radical translation” and Davidson’s “radical interpretation” – concerns that necessary presupposition of every understanding that is shown in extreme cases of indecipherability. Such a minimum content consists in understanding an existence. Indeed, Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics has weaved together understanding and existence to the point that it is possible to establish an analogy between the existential analysis and the several grades of text decipherability: the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic existence can be (...) read as a passage from the semantic (radical interpretation) to the syntactic (radical translation) and to the ontological level (radical understanding). The level of radical understanding is the one in which the minimal content of understanding coincides with its formal condition of possibility, in which understanding is to understand an existence. (shrink)

Hermeneutic rationality arises from the idea that experience is a cumulative process, in which differences are not eliminated but preserved. The universality which derives from this process is an “intensional universality”, which follows a law of direct proportionality between extension and intension: the more an educated individual enriches her experiences, the more she is able to universalize her understanding of others. Experience is then inevitably open and never closed, that is, free for other experiences. If we use the word “domain” (...) to describe the condition of a closed and predetermined system or ontology, the entities of which are pre-assumed, we can therefore call this open universality a “universality without domain”.This description of hermeneutical experience leads to a question about its logical and ontological presuppositions. In the second part of the paper I refer to a particular practice which is central for hermeneutical theory in order to show how I understand these presuppositions: the practice of translation. In translation we experience the impossibility of rendering completely the sense of the source language in a target language, that is, we experience a difference which cannot be suppressed. I compare this experience to the discovery of the incommensurable magnitudes in ancient Greek mathematics, a discovery that shook Parmenidean and Pythagorean ontology: in my opinion, philosophical hermeneutics more or less implicitly develops the consequences of this incredible discovery, which marks the passage to a differential, comparative and integrative rationality and ontology. (shrink)

Con la palabra “biotecnología” podemos entender una tecnología que modifica la vida en el sentido de zoé o de bios. Mientras en el primer caso hablamos de OGM, en el segundo sería más indicado hablar de OCM. En este texto me propongo examinar el significado de esta intervención tecnológica sobre la vida, partiendo de que el hombre es un animal intrínsecamente cultural, que modifica con la tecnología el ambiente circundante y por lo tanto a sí mismo. Los conceptos que intervienen (...) en la definición del hombre como OCM son el de “mundo” y el de “espíritu objetivo”. En la parte final presento una confrontación con la teoría de la mente extendida de Clark y Chalmers, proponiendo una tesis diferente, la “mente concreta”. (shrink)

In this text, I connect the concept of existence worked out by Heidegger with the concepts of radical understanding. Under this concept I mean the idea that existence is the radical content of every understanding. The fact that according to Heidegger existence is understanding is then explained through their common structure: existence is possibility as well as understanding is directed prominently to possibility. But, as it is shown through wider references to ancient as well as to some contemporary discussions, possibility (...) introduces in the structure of existence a certain incommensurability: that is why existence can never be reduced to a positive, actual reality, but is always “something more” than actuality. (shrink)

In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud asks how and if the dream, which is made of images, can express its connective structure, and in particular the negation. This can be made only by interpretation. This question represents the thread to examine the problem of the critical import of figurative arts, by comparing Adorno’s and Heidegger’s theories. According to Adorno, the artwork is mimesis: the capability to express negativity coincides with its autonegation, with its disappearing. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the (...) artwork is first of all a work, and interpretation is the reconstruction of its genesis, or better, the understanding of it as temporal. In the last part of the text the problem of the relationship between negation and image is tackled discussing Magritte’s painting «Ceci n’est pas une pipe»: the structure of this painting makes it a rebus, the deciphering of which carries a conceptual and interpretative work. Only this interpretation can account for the negation that it, as image, could otherwise not express. (shrink)

Kant’s critical project has been understood as a description of the functioning of knowledge. Such an understanding of the first Critique seems however limited, especially if we consider Kant’s frequent use of political analogies. These analogies suggest another reading in which Kant’s critical project emerges as an attempt to overcome a state of nature in reason through the institution of a legal state in and by reason itself. Seen in this perspective, Kant’s critical metaphysics can be considered revolutionary, because it (...) assumes the issues of the two revolutions of modernity, the political and the scientific one: from the former, Kant adopts the conviction that a conflict can be settled only through the separation and reciprocal limitation of powers, as theorized by Locke and Montesquieu - and thus neither by force nor by the establishment of an absolute power; from the latter, he acquires a model of proof, which is based, not on description, but on the elaboration of an explicative hypothesis. The Critique of Pure Reason, then, is not a mere treatise of epistemology or of descriptive metaphysics, but the attempt of setting up a policy of reason at the service of peace and civil communal life. (shrink)

“Radical understanding” – an expression recalling Quine’s “radical translation” and Davidson’s “radical interpretation” – concerns that necessary presupposition of every understanding that is shown in extreme cases of indecipherability. Such a minimum content consists in understanding an existence. Indeed, Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics has weaved together understanding and existence to the point that it is possible to establish an analogy between the existential analysis and the several grades of text decipherability: the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic existence can be (...) read as a passage from the semantic to the syntactic and to the ontological level. The level of radical understanding is the one in which the minimal content of understanding coincides with its formal condition of possibility, in which understanding is to understand an existence. (shrink)

La compréhension ontologique de Hegel et Heidegger peut être explorée à travers le rôle que les éléments grammaticaux jouent dans leur philosophies: Hegel confère une importance incontestée au nom, et surtout à la forme nominative, la forme du Sujet; d'après Heidegger par contre on peut remarguer un usage du langage qui défie l'eactitude syntaxique, mais qui témoigne l'effort de parvenir à une compréhension non-catégorielle de l'être.

Heidegger’s philosophy has been interpreted as an absolute historicism, unable to point to a unhistorical standpoint from which history can be judged upon. K. Löwith, for instance, has indicated that the cause of this difficulty is to be found in the conception of time: whereas, in Greek thought, time was considered only as a manifestation of the essence, in modern thought time has the tendency to become the essence itself, as that which fulfills itself in time, up to Heidegger’s identification (...) of being and event. What is interesting in my critique is that the conception of time is strictly interwoven with a specific way of conceiving justice and, broadly speaking, ethics. In Plato’s philosophy, justice as measure corresponds to a cyclical and even retrogressive conception of time, the one enounced in the myth of Chronos, in the Politikos. The modern conception of time, spiritualistic and biologistic, is instead cyclical and irreversible, cumulative: its most significant expression is Hegelianism. The existential conception of time, instead, is neither cyclical nor cumulative. By commenting on Heidegger’s Anaximander’s Saying, I wish to show the possibility of conceiving temporality as disjunction and only as such capable of producing justice – which I understand as a new possibility of meaning that does not exclude, but carries within itself, emancipation. An ethics of the present developed on the basis of this conception of time – which Heidegger has not completely endorsed – would then be an ethics which accepts as its own ground the discontinuous, yet inventive, dimension of time. (shrink)

Luigi Pareyson’s concept of formativity is one of his most relevant and original concepts. In this paper I will give a short exposition of this concept in Pareyson’s Estetica and try to show how it can account, better as other object-, subject-, target- oriented theories, even of some features of contemporary art. The very relevant innovation that we can find in this concept is the shift from a concept of art as poiesis—as it is in Aristotle, namely, as a production (...) of an object—to the concept of art as praxis, that is, as an activity which involves the entire doing of the artist. As a doing that invents the form of doing, formativity appears as a kind of schematism that operates, not only without concept, as it is in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, but even without object. The thesis here suggested is that formativity can be understood as a transcendentalism of invention. (shrink)

In her everyday work, the translator faces the multiplicity of languages, experiencing their irreducible diversity. Is this a condition of imperfection or something that can have a positive meaning? This question is the starting point for some reflections about the philosophical meaning of translation. What does the experience of translation teach us? In the wake of some authors who reflected on it – such as F. Schleiermacher and J. Ortega y Gasset -, we will consider how translation is an essential (...) praxis in the development of cultures, which fosters their osmosis and above all allows them to become aware of their diversity. If, on one hand, to translate can be the symptom of a deep-rooted nationalism, on the other hand, it can be a way to prevent the totalitarian closure: translation, as Ortega said through a very beautiful metaphor, is “a voyage to the foreign.” The task of the translator has therefore a great political and cultural meaning: that of fostering such encountering, on the limit between identitarian closure and feeling of diversity. (shrink)

The essay proposes an interpretation of the myth of the cave as a passage from a digital ontology to a non-digital ontology. This passage implies a reconsideration of Parmenidean and Pythagorean ontology, for which the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes is central. In particular, it allows an exteriority to a given system to be conceptualized, in which the possibility of an exit and then of freedom lies.

Kant’s critical project has been understood as a description of the functioning of knowledge. Such an understanding of the first Critique seems however limited, especially if we consider Kant’s frequent use of political analogies. These analogies suggest another reading in which Kant’s critical project emerges as an attempt to overcome a state of nature in reason through the institution of a legal state in and by reason itself. Seen in this perspective, Kant’s critical metaphysics can be considered revolutionary, because it (...) assumes the issues of the two revolutions of modernity, the political and the scientific one: from the former, Kant adopts the conviction that a conflict can be settled only through the separation and reciprocal limitation of powers, as theorized by Locke and Montesquieu - and thus neither by force nor by the establishment of an absolute power; from the latter, he acquires a model of proof, which is based, not on description, but on the elaboration of an explicative hypothesis. The Critique of Pure Reason, then, is not a mere treatise of epistemology or of descriptive metaphysics, but the attempt of setting up a policy of reason at the service of peace and civil communal life. (shrink)