Leading Italian philosophers engage issues in ethics, politics, and religion.

Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy presents for the first time in English the work of many leading Italian contemporary thinkers. It suggests a third way in the hitherto almost exclusively French and German discussion of the deconstructive critique of poststructuralism on one hand, and the emancipatory convictions of post-Marxist discourse on the other. Each essay attempts to establish the validity of this third way, some by developing the concept of "weak thought" through rigorous analysis of Marxism (...) and a reinterpretation of Nietzsche's nihilism and Heidegger's existentialism, and others by developing alternative critiques to postructuralist thinking. (shrink)

The article attempts to show that the Italian philosophy of “dialogue” (Guido Calogero, Aldo Testa) from the 1950s and the 1960s is not a “philosophy of dialogue”, understood as “New Thinking”, as a radical abandonment of the Cartesian egological perspective. The reception of that “New Thinking” of the 1920s (mainly: Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig) in Italy is significantly belated and essentially consists of simplifications and overlooks that we are dealing with a radically new thinking paradigm. (...) class='Hi'>Italian philosophers, as they themselves define it, went “their own way”. It means, however, that they have not at all opened themselves to the authentic philosophy of dialogue. (shrink)

Philosophy is cosmopolitan and immune to the influence of the idea of nation; it does not depend on some specific linguistic heritage, and, anyway, tends to be in contrast to the various nationalisms. Nevertheless, in front of the crisis of the very idea of national identity, not only the Ueberweg dedicates an entire volume to the Italian philosophy of the Eighteenth century, but also he reconstructs it on a regional level, following the catchment areas of the single (...) universities, academies and scientific societies as a unit of measurement. The volume shows the usefulness of joining the approach of the philosophical history of philosophy, the traditional history of philosophy, together with the historical history of philosophy, according to the interdisciplinary method of survey developed by the history of ideas yesterday and by the intellectual history today. (shrink)

The traditional and lively interest in Meinong's philosophy and related topics among Italian philosophers gives rise to this volume of MEINONG STUDIES.

The paper offers a critical review of Roberto Farneti’s paper a minor philosophy. The state of the art of philosophical scholarship in Italy , recently published in Philosophia. It is argued that overall the status and interest of philosophy as practiced nowadays in Italy is less disappointing than Farneti makes out. It is also maintained that submitting papers to peer-refereed international journals can help cure the moral and sociological disease that besets the Italian academia, but that, as (...) such, it is less likely to improve the scientific quality of contributions in philosophy than Farneti claims. In passing, a few recommendations both to the philosophical community at large and to the Italian Government are put forward. (shrink)

Puts leading Italian thinkers into conversation with established Continental philosophers concerning the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression.

This book is a treasure house of Italian philosophy. Narrating and explaining the history of Italian philosophers from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the author identifies the specificity, peculiarity, originality, and novelty of Italian philosophical thought in the men and women of the Renaissance. The vast intellectual output of the Renaissance can be traced back to a single philosophical stream beginning in Florence and fed by numerous converging human factors. This work offers historians and (...) philosophers a vast survey and penetrating analysis of an intellectual tradition which has heretofore remained virtually unknown to the Anglophonic world of scholarship. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give (...) an international audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, (...) politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives. For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today. Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life. (shrink)

In the inter-war period Italian philosophical culture was dominated by idealistic, spiritualistic and religious brands of philosophies, among which Benedetto Croce’s and Giovanni Gentile’s kinds of idealism were the prevailing ones. These idealistic philosophies were characterized by a strong aversion for positivistic, pragmatist and scientific philosophies which, in the first decades of our century, were represented in Italy above all by Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni , Giuseppe Peano and Federigo Enriques. Italian ‘scientific philosophy’ lost in the battle (...) with Croce’s and Gentile’s idealistic philosophies. On the political level, the hegemony of Croce and Gentile coincided with the years of Fascist dictatorship . On the cultural level, this hegemony caused the suppression of scientific culture and philosophy in comparison with humanistic culture, and the subsequent philosophical isolation of Italy from the majority of the movements of scientific philosophy working in those years in the other European countries and in the United States of America. (shrink)

With a preface by Gianni Vattimo, this book offers both an overview of contemporary Italian philosophy and a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ in connection with the notion of freedom as the original dynamic of the will to power.

With a preface by Gianni Vattimo, this book offers both an overview of contemporary Italian philosophy and a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ in connection with the notion of freedom as the original dynamic of the will to power.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

The work of contemporary Italian thinkers, what Roberto Esposito refers to as Italian Theory, is attracting increasing attention around the world. This book explores the reasons for its growing popularity, its distinguishing traits, and why people are turning to these authors for answers to real-world issues and problems. The approach he takes, in line with the keen historical consciousness of Italian thinkers themselves, is a historical one. He offers insights into the great "unphilosophical" philosophers of life—poets, painters, (...) politicians and revolutionaries, film-makers and literary critics—who have made Italian thought, from its beginnings, an "impure" thought. People like Machiavelli, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci were all compelled to fulfill important political roles in the societies of their times. No wonder they felt that the abstract vocabulary and concepts of pure philosophy were inadequate to express themselves. Similarly, artists such as Dante, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leopardi, or Pasolini all had to turn to other disciplines outside philosophy in order to discuss and grapple with the messy, constantly changing realities of their lives. For this very reason, says Esposito, because Italian thinkers have always been deeply engaged with the concrete reality of life and because they have looked for the answers of today in the origins of their own historical roots, Italian theory is a "living thought." Hence the relevance or actuality that it holds for us today. Continuing in this tradition, the work of Roberto Esposito is distinguished by its interdisciplinary breadth. In this book, he passes effortlessly from literary criticism to art history, through political history and philosophy, in an expository style that welcomes non-philosophers to engage in the most pressing problems of our times. As in all his works, Esposito is inclusive rather than exclusive; in being so, he celebrates the affirmative potency of life. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. (...) Although eccentric by Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

Back in vogue today is the tendency of Italian philosophy toward reflection on itself that has always characterized an important part of our historiographical tradition. The present essay firstly analyzes the various interpretative positions in respect to the legitimacy, the risks, and the benefits of such a discourse, which intends to distinguish the different traditions of thought by resorting to a criterion of territorial or national kind. Secondly, the essay examines diverse paradigms that identify – in “precursory genius”; (...) in ethical and civil vocation; and in “living thought” – the distinctive hallmark of the Italian philosophical tradition from the Renaissance to today. (shrink)

This article provides a much-needed introduction to the philosophical debates around nihilism and negative thought which preoccupied many Italian left intellectuals in the seventies, and which still have important repercussions today. In order to present the principal stakes of the ‘Left Heideggerian’ current, the article undertakes a close reading of Massimo Cacciari’s 1976 book Krisis, and of Antonio Negri’s critical response to it—first in a review of the book, and then in a number of texts from the seventies and (...) eighties, closely analysed by Mandarini, in which Negri develops a positive political metaphysics. This contrast between Cacciari and Negri allows Mandarini to investigate the significance of seemingly recondite philosophical issues to the development of Italian radical political thought, and to identify some of the key stakes of this debate: the status of politics and the political, the role of ontology, the place of dialectics and, crucially, the opposition between Cacciari’s formalistic understanding of negativity and Negri’s link between negativity and antagonism. (shrink)