The aim of this paper is to indicate some methodological boundaries determining to which extent Plato invites the readers of the Timaeus to apply a deliteralizing
reading. More specifically, I shall focus on a limited – but representative – set of test-cases, ranging from the description of the demiurge’s action to the composition of human body to the eschatological section, and I will highlight that only in very specific circumstances Plato’s account requires literalization.

Plato, Timaeus, Exegetical method, Literalism, Cosmology.

The article deals with a group of verses (670-678) from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, whose argumentative structure and anti-Platonism will be extensively clarified and analysed. In particular, Lucretius criticises Plato’s anamnesis by means of the “identity principle”, whose truth is empirically demonstrated. But Lucretius’ criticism is also quite misleading when it comes to Plato’s employment of the reminiscence. How to explain it? In the article, two hypotheses are put forward, and both of them testify to Lucretius’ knowledge of Plato’s very words and also to his willingness to deliver on his public’s forma mentis.

Lucretius, Plato, Reminiscence, Identity, Immortality.

The article advances a reading of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy that dispenses with “clear and distinct ideas”. Since Descartes’s lifetime, these concepts have become a trademark of his philosophy and a target for his critics, on account of their vagueness and inconsistency. The article provides evidence that, by and large, “clear and distinct ideas” were intended by Descartes to convey in simpler, catchier terms a much more elaborate argument, ultimately grounded on the system of the mind’s faculties. The article argues that, through this enquiry, Descartes meant to provide a space of reasons wherein to establish key contentions of his philosophy, to include those involving the existence of both mind and bodies. The article concludes by showing that the traditional portrayal of Descartes as an unmitigated intuitionist is, at best, one-sided.

Descartes; Ideas; Clear and Distinct; Faculties; Truth.

Music unites two great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment: D. Diderot and J.-J. Rousseau. Music is the only art capable of representing not the object but the feelings aroused in the soul by the object itself. And in this investigation into sensibility, the Querelle des Bouffons is the historical event that aligns the two thinkers side by side in support of Italian music, which is superior in expressing the feelings and passions of the human soul to the French opera represented by J.-P. Rameau. The divergent views between the latter and J.-J. The differing opinions between Rousseau and J.-J. Rousseau, on elements such as melody/harmony, imitation/expression, and Italian/French opera, shed further light on the reasons for a lively debate that focused on man and his need, through art, to express his passions, feelings, and daily essentials in a society that would soon be the scene of great revolutions.

Sensibility, Querelle des Bouffons, Music, Opera, Language, Melody, Harmony, Expression, Imitation, Genius, Art, Encyclopédie.

Mainly studied as a symbolic mother of feminism, Olympe de Gouges wrote interesting observations concerning justice, grace and the rigor of laws. After a brief presentation of the author’s thought, this essay focuses on some writings drawn up between 1792 and 1793, occasioned by the trial of the deposed king, which capture some theoretical issues relevant to Western legal culture. In this sense, degougian writings become useful texts for an investigation in the history of the philosophy of law.

Olympe de Gouges, History of Philosophy of Law, French Revolution, Law, Justice.

This article aims at offering an outline of the relationship between Kojève’s philosophy and diplomatic agenda, and the liberal tradition of thought and policy making. A major shift in the meaning of Kojève’s pivotal concepts, such as the «end of history» and the «universal and homogeneous state», will be assessed and compared to Kojève’s mutating political stances: from the pro-Soviet position through the Hegelian seminar of the 1930s, to the appraisal of «Fordist capitalism» during his later career as a diplomat. Moreover, the proto-neoliberal project for a politically united Europe led by economic integration (the Latin Empire project, 1945) and its similarity to a contemporary project by Hayek will be especially taken into account to carefully suggest a partial political proximity between Kojève and neoliberal theorists in the aftermath of the war. To this end, Kojève’s role in the creation of the international institutions that directly led to the European Union and the World Trade Organization will be considered, as well as his correspondence with Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt.

Kojève, Hegel, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Socialism.

The ‘return’ of the concept of slavery within philosophical reflection in the twentieth century after the abolition of slavery, during the nineteenth century, is located in Kojève’s interpretative reconstruction in the lecture course of the 1930s on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It is this ‘return’, and the particular determination of the concept of slavery which results from it, which is the focus of critical reflection. The critical reflection commences by examining the interconnection that the Kojèvian interpretative reconstruction, as a philosophical anthropology, establishes between slavery and the end of history. The analysis then proceeds to the particular departure of Agamben’s The Open from this Kojèvian background and the manner in which it introduces the task of rendering the anthropological machine inoperative. The analysis concludes by rethinking the centrality of slavery within philosophical reflection by extricating itself from both the original ‘return’ of slavery in the Kojèvian interpretative reconstruction and the repositioning of slavery as product of the operation of a variant of the more fundamental anthropological machine revealed by Agamben in the departure from Kojève.

Agamben, Kojève, Labour, Master, Slave, Slavery, Work.

This paper aims to address the issue of translation from an aesthetic and cross-cultural perspective. In particular, the focus of the paper is on Karl Löwith’s reflections on his experience in Japan, contained in a series of essays published between the 1940s and 1960s. These essays are a valuable and at the same time problematic testimony to the dialogical and translational relationship between the German West and the Japanese East. The issue of translation is therefore not only addressed in this paper in literary terms, but, in a broader sense, as a possibility to access common cultural experiences and worldviews. First of all, it was intended to show the relationship between hermeneutics and translation through a brief critical reconstruction of the positions of Heidegger, Gadamer and Löwith. Secondly, we have showed how Löwith describes the Japanese spiritual experiences of Zen and Shintō, with the aim of challenging the idea that Löwith’s positions are based solely on Hegelian Eurocentric assumptions. Thirdly, we addressed the issue of the translatability of experiences such as “truth” and “kindness” in the aesthetic sphere, with reference to the theme of dissimulation. We also addressed the theme of the “modernisation” of Japan with reference to Sōseki Natsume’s work Sanshirō and some of Georg Simmel’s reflections on the metropolis. Finally, we addressed the issue of translation in relation to Japanese architecture and the notions of kire-tsuzuki (切れ・つづき), utsuri-watari (移り渉り) and ma (間).

Translation, Hermeneutics, Kire, Zen, Relation.

Central to Michel Foucault’s reflection on the status of the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of critique expresses the philosophical attitude of modernity, understood as an ethical and political relation to the present. The question of actuality as belonging of philosophy to its own time is discussed by Foucault in Qu’estce que les Lumières ?, a famous commentary on Kant’s pamphlet, which in the American version, What is Enlightenment, includes a reference to a text by Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne. This contribution will read the relationship between Kant and Baudelaire in Foucault’s last intervention according to a double meaning: as the reverse of the archaeological enquiry into the limits of experience, placed by Foucault already in the 1960s at the center of Kant’s modern episteme; as the complement of the philosophical ethos on which the negative determinations of the exit (issue) and of the reflexive indocility (indocilité réfléchie) insist. These forms shape the processes of subjectivation discussed by Foucault in his last studies on sexuality and the hermeneutics of the subject.

Foucault, Kant, Baudelaire, Enlightenment, Ethics, Criticism.

The relation between Schwarze Pädagogik (also known as black pedagogy) and gender-based violence is rarely discussed by philosophers and pedagogists. Starting from this gap, the aim of this paper is to explore the link between these issues, showing how much black pedagogy still negatively affects our society. To this aim, we will analyze the birth of Schwarze Pädagogik’s concept, Rousseau’s pedagogical licterature and the stereotipical image of women from the XVIII century onwards. This will allow us to grasp the roots of the intergenerational transmission of violence and to underline the dramatic need for extensive research on Children’s Rights.

Violence, Rousseau, Schwarze Pädagogik, Children’s Rights, Gender Inequality.