In this paper, we set out the main reasons that led us to prepare a new edition of Galileo’s Saggiatore (1623), the work that originated from a dispute with the Jesuit mathematician Orazio Grassi on the nature and motion of comets that appeared in the second half of 1618. Above all, we emphasise an aspect, almost always ignored by Galilean historiography, namely the hypothetical character that Galileo attributes to his own cometary theory. Finally, in the concluding part, we expound the elements that distinguish our edition from previous ones.
This article reconstructs the different interpretations of Galileo’s thought, and notably of The Assayer, proposed by Antonio Banfi, Ludovico Geymonat and Mario Dal Pra. Using unpublished notes prepared by the latter for a course held at the State University of Milan in 1961-62, it shows how Dal Pra avoided superimposing on Galileo’s thought those ideological and political concerns that can instead be found in the biographies of Galileo written by Banfi and Geymonat, which were both strongly conditioned by the cultural climate of the Second World War, and of the post-war period.
In the 1960s, a renewal around Galileo’s work began in Italian studies. It can be defined around two points: a more authentic consideration of the rhetorical resources of scientific prose and a more accurate reconstruction of the historical context in which the new experimental science operated. For both, the important role played by Ezio Raimondi and the Bolognese school, which had Andrea Battistini as one of its leading experts, should be mentioned. After retracing this season of revival, the essay, in its second part, proceeds from the general to the particular by giving the example of a text that is exemplary of the context of the reception of Galileo’s Saggiatore. It is a pamphlet entitled Trutina, a small treatise on rhetoric composed by Federico Borromeo, the cardinal archbishop of Milan, Galileo’s correspondent, close to the Accademia dei Lincei and an attentive connoisseur of new astronomical discoveries.
In relation to the character «dottor Bozio», a fictional figure within Iacopo Soldani’s satirical composition Against the Peripatetics, the article proposes interpreting Galileo’s The Assayer through an anti-Bozian lens. This suggests viewing it as a text that adeptly captured common aspirations for the renewal of knowledge, infused with ethical and political significance. While The Assayer undoubtedly emerged from a controversy involving individuals with varied dispositions, each more or less cognizant of the dynamics of power and patronage prevalent in their milieu, it would be reductionist to attribute the genesis and aims of the work solely to these factors. Importantly, The Assayer also stands as a scientific endeavor whose significance warrants reevaluation, particularly in its potential impact on subsequent discussions on comets involving Copernican astronomers.
Galileo Galilei occupies a prominent place in Sofia Vanni Rovighi’s work on early modern philosophy. She devoted several writings and university lectures to the figure and thought of Galileo. This essay reconstructs Vanni Rovighi’s interpretation of Galileo, highlighting key themes – such as the mathematisation of nature and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as outlined in The Assayer – within the broader context of the relationship between science and philosophy.
In his letter to Paul V about the comets of 1618, Campanella urges the pope to take ‘apocalyptic’ decisions (war and missions to heretics and Turks), justified by the exceptional stars detected in the sky, signs of God’s will. In his report, no allusion could be made yet to the contributions later given by Orazio Grassi, Mario Guiducci and Galileo. Campanella intervened again about the topic in works edited after the debate of 1619-1623: Astrologicorum libri, Quaestiones Physiologicae, Metaphysica. In his astrology, Campanella offers a compendium about comets, useful to professionals, students and beginners. In the Quaestiones he compares and criticizes ancient and modern physical theories about comets, and in particular he argues against some of the Tyconic positions, shared by Grassi. He is also largely engaged in a critical check of Galileo’s views and tenets, but his prevailing aim is to demonstrate how ingenious and stimulating are, but just provisional, and always lacking, the astronomical explications of events, whose ‘truth’ should be assessed in astrology, metaphysics and escathology. Finally, it sounds theological and cosmological the discourse about comets in Metaphysica, carried out in the frame of a revendication of astrology in a Catholic context, and of Campanella’s philosophy of nature, opposed to ‘neo-pythagorean’ cosmologies.
The short apocryphal treatise On the Nature of the World and the Soul attributed to Timaeus Locrus, pretending to be the actual source of Plato’s Timaeus, has received some attention by the scholars as a witness of early Imperial Platonic cosmology, and as an early piece of exegesis of Plato’s dialogue. The aim of this study is to show how this text was influential not only with regard to cosmological aspects of Imperial Platonism, but also in establishing a doctrine of principles and being, based on the interpretation and discussion of Plato’s text within the Old Academy; the author seems to be particularly interested in the Aristotelian criticism of Plato’s views, especially with regard to the status of mathematical objects, the problem of separateness between Forms and the physical world, and the role of matter.
In this paper, I am discussing the case of Hipparchia of Maroneia, the Cynic philosopher of the late 4th century BC. She became the start-point for the reconsideration of the role of the woman as a silent person engaged solely in housework. I will firstly examine the way she refuses all conventions connected to her elite background. Secondly, I will focus on the influence the Cynic philosophy and Crates par excellence had on her in order that she could be transformed into an athlete of continuous corporeal and rational exercise. Hipparchia resists the ironic and hostile comments of her contemporary philosophers by using her rhetorical ability, based on her education from the strong Dogs (the Cynics) and by adopting a lifestyle that provokes a hostile attitude from her contemporaries. As a third and last point, I will show the way she chooses to confront these attacks and how she embodies the Cynic philosophy taught to her by Crates, that is her teacher and husband. Moreover, I will investigate the way she offers her own personality as a vivid example of reassessing the fallacies of the organized society in her day, by becoming, as M.-O. Goulet-Cazé argues, a «féministe avant l’heure».
The article presents a proposal for a ternary plan of structural moments for finite beings within the framework of an original exegesis concerning the univocatio entis that culminates in the Scotist paradigm. These ontological moments include natural community (natura communis: communicability ut quod or as ratio quod essendi of an intrinsically modulable nature into singularities) and individuation (incommunicability ut quod of individuated nature, subsequently communicable ut quo – ratio quo essendi – with identity or dependence on suppositum: intrinsic / extrinsic communicabilitas ut quo), along with the supra-ontological moment of incommunicability ut quo (suppositalitas). Individuation represents the ultima actualitas formae, signifying the expected ontological culmination of existence. Personality entails the incommunicability ut quo of an intellectually singularized nature and will be the ultima solitudo.
This essay aims to analyze the way in which Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus try to talk about God conceived in Neoplatonic terms. In line with a Late-ancient and Medieval tradition that firmly denies an immediate cognition of the metaphysical One, both affirm the clear impossibility for the human intellect to truly know the Principle of everything. Nevertheless, despite this fundamental limit, they also admit the crucial possibility of a theological or spiritual reflection of symbolic and metaphorical nature. So, I shall examine the proximity and the differences of their discourses, paying particular attention to the direct conceptual influence of Eckhart on the Cusanian elaboration, in order to underline the peculiar role that images can play in relation to these aspects of their theoretical thought.
This paper elucidates Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s conception of the beginning of philosophy as articulated in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1804/II. It argues that a legitimate beginning of philosophy must emerge from a reflection on the operative discontinuity inherent in conceptualization itself. Fichte observes that our conceptual-linguistic framework – at its operative level – continuously generates a disjunction between the act of speaking and the spoken content. From this insight, he formulates a central philosophical question: how can the unity of reason, which precedes and grounds all such disjunctions, present itself to the subject in a legitimate manner without entailing performative self-contradiction? I contend that Fichte introduces the notion of genetic evidence to ground this unity of reason. Rather than conceiving unity as a static pole or principle, Fichte reconceives it as a dynamic genetic field in which reason comes to experiential self-manifestation. This field is characterized by three interrelated features: (1) transcendental geneticity, (2) experiential transcendentality, and (3) a self-legitimating dynamic. The unveiling of this genetic field constitutes the true point of departure for the Wissenschaftslehre as a self-legitimizing science.
In this article I analyse a text by Hans Urs von Balthasar which is little known to critics: Einsame Zwiesprache. Martin Buber und das Christentum (1958). In this text, Balthasar confronts Buber’s thought, identifying in it an unresolvable contradiction in the way the relationship between God and human being is thought of. On the one hand, this relationship requires a distance between God and human being, so that the dynamic of call and response that characterises the existence of the prophet and the Chassid can be established. On the other hand, the God-man relationship is described as a moment of absolute unity between them that overcomes all distance. These two aspects, according to Balthasar, are both present in Buber’s thought and remain unresolved. Balthasar proposes a solution to this contradiction through the Trinitarian mystery. This text caused a rift between the two thinkers, as Buber did not recognise himself in Balthasar’s interpretation.
It is hard to grasp the ultimate meaning of one of the most controversial passages in Genesis, namely Jacob’s all-night struggle with a mysterious figure. A recent volume by Roberto Esposito analyzes the extraordinary influence of this episode in philosophy, literature, art, politics and psychoanalysis. The passionate investigation of this «irruption» in Scripture explores the stages of the phenomenology of conscience in the Old Testament and the experience of religious conscience as such.
This article tackles some of Umberto Eco’s ideas about normality and pathologies of interpretation by showing why he recovers certain paradigms in the history of ideas, particularly those understood as encyclopedic sets of cultural habits depicting how things tend to go. While arising within concrete contexts, the theory and practice of interpretation, with their leading rules, do not belong to the plane of the texts that are their objects. While Eco applied his theory of controlled multi-interpretability of texts ever since the studies conducted in Opera Aperta, he employed it as a test bed for hermeneutic paradigms, such as hermetic semiosis and the esoteric interpretations of Dante, only after the semiotic turn. The article’s conclusion reflects upon the lawfulness, if not the necessity, of a distinction between literary text and document tout court, the duties of the interpreter, and achieving the rights of the interpretation.
This paper is a discussion on L’Uno senza fondamento. Cusano tra platonismo ed ermeneutica by Davide Monaco; it is a book that fits into the recent valorisation of Cusano’s thought, which can give us answers to several issues about contemporary philosophy. At the same time, the paper shows the importance of the book for the research about the Pareyson’s philosophy too. Thus, first of all, some recent cusanian studies in Italy – which have both historical and theoretical value – will be considered. After this, the text will deal with some topics of Monaco’s book, in order to develop a reflection firstly focused on the role of the «name». The main thesis of the book is that the history of philosophy does not necessarily coincide with the path of metaphysical oblivion that Heidegger identified: this will allow a different point of view about the history, but also about the essence of what we call, from Plato onwards, philosophy.
A. Anelli, Essere e libertà (S. Biancu) – M.R. Antognazz a, Thinking with Assent (M.G. Zaccone) – L. Cabass a - F. Pisano, Epistemologie (E. Trevisan) – M. Cacciari, Metafisica concreta (L. Azzariti-Fumaroli) – C. Frigerio, Ricomporre un cosmo in frammenti (S. Palazzo) – F. Riva, Di fronte all’altro (G. Tunesi) – F. Toccafondi, Max Scheler (G. Corbella) – C. Türcke, L’uomo folle (D. Tolomelli)