The purpose of this paper is to offer a critical analysis of the theoretical and methodological principles used in psychoanalysis, showing how the path therapist-patient is limited by systemic-relational unknowns which cannot be left out from certain working hypothesis. The limitation imposed by the therapist’s personal characteristics and by the principle of causality, on the base of the assumptions applied, makes indeed the interpretation of particular meanings not subject to a proper control. A dynamic which prevents a validation of the system methodtherapist-patient and, consequently, a validation of the therapeutic interview, also as a function of an optimization of the method. In practice there cannot be a valid demarcation line between therapist and method. A conclusion that should lead towards a radical paradigm shift.
This article aims to clarify the Heidegger’s interpretation of the Platonic concept of reminiscence, ajnavmnhsi", particularly in reference to how it is presented in the Phaedo. The main references to do this are the university courses of 1927 and 1928, respectively The basic problems of phenomenology and The metaphysical foundations of logic, where the question of Platonic reminiscence is assumed in relation to both the temporality of being-there as the theme of death and the individuation of man. In this confrontation will emerge the basic problem of the Platonic and Heideggerian reflexion about the individual’s conduct, in the practical appeal to a supposed understanding of life as exercise of death, that Socrates himself had try to teach.
Roman Ingarden and Nicolai Hartmann developed an ontology of the real world in which the analysis of human responsible action and its presuppositions plays an essential role. In this analysis several common elements can be identified, such as the acknowledgement of the objectivity of values and the centrality of the concept of person, which for both philosophers refers exclusively to the real man in the real world. The aim of the study is to analyze the way in which both Ingarden and Hartmann, on common grounds, explore the specific phenomenon of free will and deal with the issue of its ontological possibility within a deterministically structured world. Despite the differences, what emerges in both cases is a theoretical model that refuses the rigid alternative determinism-indeterminism with the aim of providing the foundations of the self-determination of man.
The decision to establish the centrality of the individual in the totality of its prerogatives, through a method built upon a process of dispossession activated by the same individual, is the distinctive feature of the singularity of Benjamin Fondane’s thought. The analysis of the philosophical genesis of this decision and the re-construction of its historical development allow us to identify the principle of historical contextualization as the device which, on the one hand, legitimizes the entire system of Fondane’s philosophy, and, on the other hand, is the cause, due to its incompleteness, of an aporetic result in his reasoning. However, the tragic interruption of Fondane’s life and the sign of a latent meaning in the lines of his discourse allow us to foreshadow, at least in the form of a question, the possibility of a development of Fondane’s philosophy that could overcome its aporetic involution.
A large part of the readers of the Metaphysics of Aristotle has concentrated somewhat unilaterally their attention on substance. But from some times important works, like those of Beere and Kosman, have recalled the importance of potentiality and activity as principles of the Aristotelian ontology. Following this point of view the problem of the relations between motion and activity takes a determining place. The aim of this paper is to show how Aristotle succeeds to establish activity and potentiality as principles of being according to the activity of each different substances and to bring out the priority of one of them by the mean of the priority of activity on potentiality.
In several chapters of his treatise On Providence (III, 2 [47] 15-18) Plotinus uses the theatre as a metaphor in his discussion of coexistence of providence and evil, as well as anthropological and ethical problems such as human autonomy and responsibility. This paper examines how Plotinus – as well as his Stoic forerunners – employed the metaphor of the theatre, paying special attention to the ways in which the metaphor was used to determine the consistency and limits of human autonomy. In order to illustrate the similarities and differences between Plotinus and the Stoics, this paper analyse how the actor is integrated into the play, and the extent to which he is shown to have some independence within it.
Although secondary literature on John of Jandun’s concept of religion has focused on the separation of philosophical research and revealed truths, there is more to say about what this author thinks about faith. More specifically, John is interested in the consequences that having a given set of religious beliefs has on a human being’s worldview and behaviour. The subject of this paper is an example of this side of John’s research: in a quaestio on the De anima about the possibility for men to know separate substances, John mentions the different effects that adhering to different religions can have on a person’s commitment to the philosophical search for God. By analyzing this and other works by the same author, the paper tries to identify the religion that according to John does not obstruct philosophers’ intellectual path.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on Giordano Bruno’s philosophy of nature, in the light of the Late Ancient tradition and the Renaissance Hermetism. The importance of such influence will be studied with regard to Bruno’s anti-Aristotelianism as to matter and the infinity of the worlds. In particular, Bruno declares to infer from Timaeus of Locri and Plato the theory of the continuous and mutual transmutation of the elements and that of the homogeneity of the matter. Also, following the Neoplatonic tradition, Bruno ascribes Plato the theory of a multiplicity of worlds, finding in the Timaeus an important source for a pluralistic cosmology; consequently, he claims the existence of an infinite number of infinite universes.
In a note of 1884, Nietzsche comments the genesis of his own thought, identifying in it three turning points: the objection to teleology; the adhesion to mechanism (denying at the same time the matter); the body as common thread of philosophical inquiries. Nietzsche interpret the important debate that had developed in Germany between the 1830s and 1860s in the medical- physiological sphere, from which he extracts a few key inputs of criticism of some traditional concepts: individuality, esprit, matter, the self etc. The first questioning of philosophic and scientific teleology is carried out in a group of young notes on the vision of the organism included in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. For Nietzsche, the elimination of teleology has a practical rather than a theoretical value: it clears life and the world from the assumptions of moralization. But, at the same time, teleology also has a political value as it works as a controlling device of the forms of life.
Ada Lamacchia’s scholarship firstly introduced into Italy the works of Francis Wayland, one of the leading moral philosophers of American nineteenth-century Academic Orthodoxy. After drawing an outline of Wayland’s philosophical and religious context, this article analyses Lamacchia’s reading of Wayland’s ethics ‘in the sign of critical reason.’ Focusing on Wayland’s anti-utilitarian stance, his social ethics, and the interactions between philosophical thought and Reformed theology in antebellum America, Lamacchia stresses both the affinities between Wayland’s Moral Science and Kant’s ethics in their speculative sources and motives, and the differences that peculiar cultural circumstances imparted to their thought. In this way Lamacchia’s interpretation also offers a very interesting perspective on the debate on modernity in nineteenth-century America.
T. Tambassi, Il rompicapo della realtà. Metafisica, ontologia e filosofia della mente in E.J. Lowe (S. Cuconato) - R. Brague, Dove va la storia? Dilemmi e speranze (G. Bonvegna) - M. Rosàs Tosas, Mesianismo en la filosofía contemporánea.De Benjamin a Derrida (M. Seguró)
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