Filosofia

Terramare

2023-04-05T16:49:35+02:00

Il Mediterraneo, a differenza dell’Oceano, è un mare circondato da terre, “terramare”, come Stefano D’Arrigo definiva il mare dello Stretto di Messina, tra Scilla e Cariddi. Da un punto di vista geofilosofico il Mediterraneo rappresenta il paradigma di una identità plurale, di una forma di coesistenza tra differenti culture. Questo incessante incontro tra terra e mare è inscritto nel mito dell’origine dell’Europa e ne ha segnato profondamente la storia e il destino. Mentre l’Oceano rappresenta lo spazio omogeneo e vuoto dell’Illimite, che non conosce confini, il Mediterraneo è l’incessante confronto con i bordi, da sponda a sponda. In questo tempo, segnato da una globalizzazione priva di regole e da una guerra imperiale di aggressione, che colpisce al cuore il Vecchio Continente, l’Europa è chiamata a decidere del proprio avvenire, ritrovando nel Mediterraneo non solo la propria origine, ma anche il paradigma per costituirsi come grande spazio di pacifica convivenza tra differenti, di traduzione e di ospitalità nei confronti dell’estraneo.

The ocean: Excursion and return

2023-04-05T17:02:08+02:00

The ocean with its coastal seas is under increasing anthropogenic pressure, severely threatening ocean health and marine life. Human dependency on and management of the ocean are disconnected, which is in part why the United Nations (UN) is launching the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021–2030 (“Ocean Decade”). Here we investigate how philosophy and literature can inspire us to change the relationship between humans and the ocean. The starting point is natural science and human exploration of the sea. Then we consider philosophy, starting from Aristotle’s forms of knowledge – episteme, techne, and phronesis – focusing particularly on phronesis, or practical wisdom. Referring to Homer’s Odyssey, we investigate the threats that the ocean may face during the UN’s Ocean Decade. From this, we identify several things that will make for a successful Ocean Decade: practical wise leadership, clear vision, societal involvement, information sharing, admitting the vulnerability of both the ocean and humans, and storytelling.

L’oceano senza legge

2023-04-05T16:23:43+02:00

Starting from the famous Kantian page, within the Critique of pure reason, relating to the distinction between phaenomena and noumena, the present article intends to verify what role the sea plays in the structuring of law by focusing on some salient passages of the modern Western tradition. Through Hegel’s texts, with particular attention to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the novel Moby Dick written by Melville, Michelet’s essay entitled The Sea, and above all through the reference to Schmitt’s texts, the article attempts to connect the land-sea dialectical to some of the decisive issues of the contemporary age: the transition from legitimacy to legality; the statute of national borders with respect to the formation and permanence of a State identity; the dynamics favored by the element we call “sea” on the level of political economy.

Abyss or Khora

2023-04-05T16:10:51+02:00

Since Plato, western philosophy has had an uneasy relationship with the sea. The sea has always acted as the unspoken that threatens to breaks up the laborious definitions attained by philosophical achievements. Of all the thinkers who grapple with the maritime latency of philosophy and the openness inherent to thinking, Nietzsche is perhaps the most outspoken about the force of the sea for the birth of a new philosophy. Throughout his works, Nietzsche has consistently commended: “Aboard the ships, ye philosophers!” Nowhere has Nietzsche pursued the philosophical potency of the maritime so forcefully as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this essay, I aim to show how the sea is pivotal to the thinking of eternal recurrence and how Zarathustra comes to embody the maritime and becomes a khoratic site of hospitality and transfiguration—for the birth of new historical values and for the condition of possibility of the value of values.

Dialettica degli elementi: mari, spazi, poteri

2023-04-05T17:23:32+02:00

Starting from the contrast between land and sea as historical forces, the article uses Carl Schmitt's categories for a philosophical analysis of the concept of space, from antiquity to the global age. The text reconstructs the historical-political dynamics of the transformations that took place in modern times in the relationship between land and sea, in a comparison with the philosophical roots of ancient Greece and with the imploding of globalization processes. In the context of the planetary context, the path of rise and decline of the powers is traced according to the relationship with the maritime forces and with the land forces. The current scenario is affirmed as an area in which the outcome of this opposition can reveal the decisive pivot points for the future world political order.

Contro l’autoctonia

2023-04-05T16:57:02+02:00

In this essay I analyze the role of the sea from historical, symbolic and eschatological perspectives in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig, who proposed a radical philosophy of the diaspora. I consider his historic-philosophical account of the opposition between land and sea in Globus and compare it with his theological-political analysis of Judaism in the Star of Redemption. I show how his conception of an uprooted Judaism coheres with his critique of the nation-state, already developed during the war years. I spell out the metaphoric significance that the sea has in Rosenzweig’s Globus in order to illuminate the complex relationship between state and diaspora, history and eternity.

Questioning Quine’s Assertion that Mass Terms like “Water” Ill-Fit the Singular/General Dichotomy

2023-04-05T17:04:38+02:00

In §19 of Word and Object Quine claims that mass terms ill-fit the dichotomy between singular terms and general terms. In so doing, Quine is able to demonstrate a serious problem regarding the criteria of identity of the class of objects/‘stuff’ to which mass terms refer. Nevertheless, Quine’s account that mass terms are, in predication, ambiguous between singular/general, and that they therefore ‘ill-fit’ this dichotomy, faces several issues, and his onto- grammatical paradigm is therefore inadequate or incomplete in at least the following regards: (§2) Quine’s account of the childhood development conceptual scheme is problematically committed to Skinnerian behaviourism; (§3) mass terms are not the only type of nouns which are ambiguous between singular/general [and therefore Quine is incorrect to see this ambiguity as unique and significant]; (§4) Quine failed to distinguish, within the category of mass terms, between stuff nouns and non-stuff nouns; (§5) the artificial reduction of mass terms to singular terms belies a problematic commitment to an ontology based in first-order predicate logic and naturalized epistemology; (§6) Quine’s attachment to an object ontology gives rise to metaphysical inconsistencies, and (§7) there are merits to P.F. Strawson’s opposing theory of the singular/general division, of instantiation by feature-placing, alongside various other views which provide a solution to Quine’s problem of mass terms.

Valery: la favola del mare

2023-04-05T17:17:56+02:00

This essay intends to focus on Paul Valéry’s thought on the sea as featured in his poetry and essays. According to Valéry, the sea is not only what can be conceived under the sign of some categories with a strong philosophical meaning (one/many, sameness/distinction, stasis/movement, variability/permanence, life/death, being/becoming), but also, and above all, it acts as the arché regarding the origin of life and philosophy. But even more than an object of reflection, the sea can be understood, in Valéry, as the very principle that underpins his phenomenology of vision. In this sense, his meditation on the shell is exemplary.

Storie di isole, lacrime e sirene

2023-04-05T16:16:52+02:00

The early Pythagoreans committed some of their early teachings to orality, in the form of cryptic symbols. Following the hypothesis that some symbols could be an early form of exegesis of poetry, this paper examines some of those difficult witnesses of ancient Pythagoreanism, trying to explain them by their relationship with myths and poems focussed on the space of the sea, and Homer’s Odyssey in particular, showing that, far from being the realm of chaos and unlimitedness, the sea of the myth was generally understood by the Pythagoreans as a boundary land lying between this world and the afterlife, which is placed in the sky. This seems to lead to a better understanding of the symbols examined and brings further evidence of the importance of myth and poetry in early Pythagorean philosophy.

Guerra ai mutanti: nella metaforica del mare alle origini dell’Antropocene

2023-04-05T17:35:22+02:00

In the Long Sixteenth Century, where World-Ecology proposes to situate the origins of the Anthropocene, we observe an overall devaluation of the principle of metamorphosis to which philosophical reflection, the experimental method, political doctrine, and even theatrical production seem to contribute. The development of this undertaking, however, the outer boundaries of which could be identified from Giovanni Pico’s reflection, is punctually disturbed by the presence of the aquatic element, with particular reference to the sea, whose connotations continue to deconstruct the movement of “separating humans from the rest of nature” that combines the production of the consistent subject with the so-called processes of primitive accumulation of capital. Therefore, the article aims to provide a historical and conceptual framework to situate this reading hypothesis.

“Perlomeno come una macchina”

2023-04-05T16:38:42+02:00

According to Gilbert Simondon, nothing that is technical is alien to the human, and in this sense, shunning the cultural myth of a technology hostile to human beings, living beings and Nature, is the first ethical gesture of responsibility that we can take. In fact, acquiring a “technical mentality” does not mean forcing ourselves into a blind utilitarian rationality, but on the contrary, developing the richness of an analogical and operational thought, a synthetic science that Gilbert Simondon sometimes calls “praxeology”, other times “general technology”, “allagmatic”, or “anthropotechnology”. Thus a deep ethical vision emerges, humanist but in the name of a continuity between the human and the other domains, both biological and physical, of reality.

Teoria delle deformazioni

2023-04-05T17:07:22+02:00

Se l’ermeneutica oggi è in crisi, è perché ogni interpretazione appare eo ipso come deformazione della verità. La ragione è semplice: là dove c’è soggettività, o iniziativa, la verità non conta, mentre là dove c’è verità, o universalità, la soggettività non conta. Per questo motivo anche la democrazia entra in crisi, apparendo ormai un locus communis che la soggettività degli elettori costituisca una palla al piede sul cammino delle riforme, la cui necessità è computabile in automatico. Contro questa deriva disastrosa, che riduce i soggetti a bestie riottose e la verità a calcolo oggettivo, l’ermeneutica filosofica, pur inattuale, appare più che mai necessaria. La questione centrale che essa solleva è se la verità sia sostanza, se cioè possa esservi verità senza soggetto, senza un apporto intrinseco di singolarità. L’aspirazione a superare i limiti della individualità non dovrebbe insomma far dimenticare che c’è un nesso originario tra la risorsa “verità” e la risorsa “singolarità”.

“Rifiuti e costellazioni”

2023-04-05T17:31:36+02:00

This essay aims to address Kracauer's concept of interstitial or intermediate space (Zwischenräum, then In- between). Since his early conviction that superficial phenomena allowed an exclusive and immediate access to the fundamental substance of reality, the categories of in-between and surface (Oberfläche) will provide indeed the main framework of Kracauer's wide-ranging thought. Reflecting upon these, he foresaw, as Benjamin later did, that the increase in rationality and the dissolution of traditional values did not correspond to the dissolution of myth and the emancipation from superstition but, rather, to their re-production and re- enforcement: which justifies the persistence and resurgence, in a hyper-rationalized society, of several anti- scientific and magical beliefs. Forms that Kracauer unmasked as essentially reactionary, as are the current and growing ones which deny the most elementary and established scientific truths. Kracauer's lesson, thus, could be very topical as it reminds us that the excesses and distortions of rationality cannot be fought and defeated by irrationality.

Truth, Scholastic Transcendentals, and the Implications of Ideal-Realism

2023-04-05T16:33:43+02:00

The paper explores the possibility of philosophical cooperation between Thomism and American pragmatism by resurrecting a largely forgotten debate between Wilmon Henry Sheldon and Jacques Maritain. The discussion focuses primarily on the problem of truth as it is discussed by Peirce and by some contemporary Thomists, including Maritain but also Milbank, Pickstock, Lonergan, Balthasar, Pieper, and Ulrich. The paper claims that, if we bring Peirce’s version of pragmatism into the picture, cooperation is not possible but likely to be fruitful for both pragmatism and Thomism.

Nome di Derrida

2023-04-05T17:41:10+02:00

Although Jackie Derrida had a deep interest in the hidden meanings of proper names, he never left us a satisfactory deconstruction of his own name. This article therefore attempts to fill this gap by examining – in a Derridean way – the name “Jackie”, whose etymology refers to the sphere of subversion. In order to achieve that, the paper takes into account two other characters from Jewish history named “Jackie” – the biblical Jacob and Jacob Frank –, who entertain an ambivalent relationship with the notion of sovereignty and embody a paradoxical coincidence of rebelliousness and obedience. The contribution then argues that – in a manner not unlike his namesakes – Derrida rejects the classical definition of power and shows the double-bind of operative de facto sovereignty and ineffectual de jure sovereignty. In conclusion, it is suggested that deconstructing the name “Jackie” helps illustrate the incompatibility of the Greek category of archè with Jewish spirituality.

Evandro Agazzi, La conoscenza dell’invisibile

2023-04-05T17:25:50+02:00