During the academic year 1978/1979 Enzo Melandri held a course in which he defended a radically new perspective on early stoicism, drawing some surprising lines of connections between the stoics and formal logic, semiotics and psychological theories developed during the first part of the XX century. In the lectures no reference whatsoever was made to the late imperial period that changed stoicism so much. The present work tries to project Melandri’s reasoning on stoic ethics of roman imperial age and does so by bridging Epictetus’s adiaphora doctrine with the theory of knowledge introduced by early stoicism.

Theory of knowledge, Stoic logic, Adiaphora.

This paper aims to discuss how, in the use of the concept of contingency by John Duns Scotus, the causal temporality of necessitas per accidens joins the notions of logical possibility and instant of nature. The analysis has to be intended inside the indeterminist tradition which is opposite to theological fatalism; it starts with Boethius’ Commentary to De Interpretatione IX and reaches the modern age with the name of “compatibilism”. In Scotus’ work, especially in chapter four of the Tractatus de Primo Principio, this kind of compatibilism concerns ontologically and metaphysically the work in tandem of intellectus and voluntas; they work together to build a theological and epistemological model in which there was not repugnantia logica but compossibility between divine omniscience and human freedom.

Duns Scotus, Contingence, Future Contingents, Divine Foreknowledge, De primo principio.

The paper aims to demonstrate the theoretical importance of Hegel’s reflection on the role and the status of Jewish poetry in the Lectures on Fine Arts. It focuses on the differences shown by the presentation of the Jewish Poetry in the Nachschriften and Mitschriften. Indeed, Jewish poetry is sometimes a moment of the symbolic form of art, sometimes a moment of the classical one. Even more it is considered as poetry and in the meantime as prose. Jewish poetry seems therefore to be a critical moment in Hegel’s system. The essay tries then to find the reason why this paradoxical status takes place in the sources from which Hegel borrows his interpretation of Jewish poetry. Even if the analysed net of historical relationships could be explanatory, it is not sufficient. In order to illustrate the significance of Hegel’s comparison with Jewish poetry it is necessary to clear up that Hegel takes charge of this cultural heritage in a speculative, philosophical way. It is to say that the paper reconstructs the way the Old Testament gains by Hegel a function in the relationship between Vorstellung and Darstellung, sensible language and conceptual language. I wish thence to show that Jewish poetry, in the context of the Lectures on Fine Arts, deals with the survival of the themes taken into consideration in the speculative sentence (Phenomenology of Spirit).

Hegel, Lectures on Fine Arts, Jewish poetry, parallelismus membrorum, speculative sentence.

The paper focuses on the relation between Kant and Nietzsche shown by Hans Vahinger’s work, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. During the preparation of this writing, as pointed out by the Vorbemerkungen zur Einführung, Vahinger discovers that his Kant’s studies and his caring for Nietzsche converge without effort. The thread that runs through this closeness is Kant’s concept of Als Ob (as if), which is by Vahinger interpreted as Schein and connected to Nietzsche’s will to power as Wille zum Schein. Vahinger adds therefore to Die Philosophie des Als Ob an appendix devoted to Nietzsche’s thinking. The paper analyses this section in order to underline the link between will to power, Perspectivism and the problem of illusion as presented by Nietzsche in the Birth of tragedy. Vahinger places hence Nietzsche’s philosophical position in the context of a pragmatism fraught with Kant’s elements.

Philosophy of As If, Kant, Nietzsche, Perspectivism.

Growth as a way to overcome the present economic crisis has been constantly invoked by policy of all advanced countries. Yet, the ideology of growth has been subjected to severe criticism for the past two hundred years, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It has been conceived with no consideration for very important scientific achievements, such as the interaction between living organisms and environment, and the Second Principle of Thermodynamics. The aim of this essay is to outline a brief history of this criticism.

economy; growth; science; thermodynamics.

This contribution takes as a starting point certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy which can be connected to a reflextion on play. The present work is guided by two questions: can the relation word-living being be described as play? Can playing activities explain something about this relation? On the one hand, looking through the lesson of some scientists – such as Goldstein, Edelman, and Sacks –, the paper shows that a philosophy of life can benefit from an investigation on play. 
On the other hand, embracing the suggestions of Paul Valéry, it proposes a reading of his notion of implexe as one of the mean traits of the living being.

Merleau-Ponty, play, life, perception, subjectivity.

Aim of this work is to analyse the pages of Histoire de la folie dedicated to Jean Racine’s theatre, in order to recognize an homology between the dramatic and poetic components of Racine’s tragedies and the theoretical and practical experience of insanity in the Âge classique. Such homology leads us to draw a parallelism between Foucault’s understanding of this epoch and his analysis of the theatrical and social universe of insanity in the Baroque period. Furthermore, this research shows that Foucault’s discourse was not isolated, but in communication with a number of studies that French and European culture was producing in these years, by experimenting new readings and by applying new critical paradigms to the masterpieces of literary tradition.

Foucault, Racine, Starobinski, insanity, theatre, Baroque, Romanticism.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the constitutive reductionism presented by Derek Parfit in his book Reasons and Persons. Through an inquiry on critical views about personal identity, it is argued that the most valuable conclusions on morality emphasized by Parfit can be appreciated even if his reductionism is abandoned in favour of some forms of non-reductionist emergentism.

Parfit, Personal Identity, Reductionism, Psychological Continuity, Emergentism.

In order to avoid any kind of hypocrisy about the gap between juridical theory and actual practice, this paper begins with a critical position towards Law, showing how problematic is the notion of universality of rights and how such notion is in debt with historical circumstances, with a distinction between what is and what ought to be, and with a Eurocentric or Western project about rights. Then, due to the fundamental moral nature of rights and to the cultural pluralism within our societies, this paper suggests to look for a “lowest common and shared morality” and to use it to support the point of view of a universal Law, together with legal systems where individual dignity and value are safeguarded.

Universal Rights, Universality, Legal System, Pluralism, Relativism.