Based on the analysis of the short treatise De divinatione daemonum and some others references in Augustinian texts, this article aims to retrace Augustine of Hyppo’s position about the nature of demons and their capacity to foretell future events. In particular, the research will explore some epistemological topics as the role of imagination and his phantasmata in the cognitive processes, the semiotic nature of demonic foreknowledge, the difference between angelic, divine, demonic and human knowledge. Finally, we’ll draw a summary map of the historical transformations of the demonic cognition’s theme, from time to time auctoritas, source and philosophical argument.

Augustine, Demons, Foreknowledge, Future Contingents, perceptual deceptions, Thomas Aquinas

A widespread historiographic commonplace, established by Thomas Aquinas himself in his Tractatus de unitate intellectus (1270), takes Siger of Brabant’s Quaestiones in tertium de anima (ca. 1265) to be a latin formulation of Ibn Rušd’s theory of the unity of the material intellect as exposed in the Tafsīr Kitāb al-Nafs (Long Commentary on the De anima, ca. 1186); according to the same view, Aquinas’ philosophy of mind would be the expression of a strongly antiaverroistic – and therefore more orthodox – kind of aristotelianism. Building on a thorough analysis of key texts in Aquinas’ Commentary on the Sentences (1255), I argue in this paper that those who hold Aquinas’ noetic to be anti-averroistic are greatly mistaken: while Siger’s always superficial rushdian inspiration is better understood against the background of a neoplatonic-tinged mind-body dualism clearly at odds with Ibn Rušd’s own strictly peripatetic ontology, Aquinas’ psychology, hylomorfic and not-dualist at its core, is aristotelian mainly inasmuch as it is rushdian.

Aristotle, philosophy of mind, material intellect, Ibn Rušd, latin aristotelianism, mind-body dualism, hylomorphism

A fragment of the Pensées points out Pascal’s wish to write a letter On Foolishness of Human Science and Philosophy: natural knowledge, as he argues, cannot explain the double principle involved in the weird condition of human beings. Thus, after examining critically stoic and skeptic theories of man, and raising objections to viewpoints on the self as substance, he draws a study of human nature based on a Christian consciousness of time. My paper aims to outline the reasons of this denial of philosophical arguments.

Pascal, Philosophy, Human Nature, Self-knowledge, Sacred History

In this paper, I propose a heterodox reading of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Specifically, the focus is on the following tripartite thesis: 1. The substance of external sensible things, understood as something different from their nominal essence, is not knowable in general, not even by sensation; 2. Even if substances were identifiable with the primary qualities of the corpuscles that compose them, those primary qualities would be knowable only by analogical inference, and would be unperceivable anyway; 3. Even if the primary qualities were perceivable, there would not be a conceivable relation between them on the one hand and the secondary qualities and the ideas of secondary qualities on the other.

In the main body of the paper, I analyse how Locke lets each horn of the tripartite thesis emerge. In the last section, I suggest that Locke’s troubles depend on his theory about the relation between knowledge and sensation. Moreover, I sketch a personal reform of this relation that could be useful to avoid the difficulties implied by the tripartite thesis.

Locke; Primary Qualities; Secondary Qualities; Substance; Realism; Skepticism.

This essay concentrates on the problem of knowledge in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy. Such a subject in Vico’s thought takes characteristics which are different from the dominant modern philosophical thought; the latter, in fact, accepting the Cartesian theories, is basically inclined to affirm that knowledge can be reached by setting aside the senses and relying exclusively on the rational power of the mind. Vico, on the contrary, asserts that there is no possibility to reach knowledge if the mind is separated from the body. The basis of knowledge is a mind that thinks and, at the same time, feels and interacts with the body. All this seems to be furthermore confirmed in the Human Science, more than in the Scientific field. The proof that this philosophical theory is valid comes from universali fantastici, which represent the first forms of human thought. Universali fantastici are identified, by the Neapolitan philosopher, with the myths of the Greek-Roman world and their formulation follows the steps of the development of mankind in its initial phases. Every divinity is elaborated thanks to a specific need; in particular, some gods are generated by anxiety or fear, whereas the others are created as a consequence of precise material needs. This way, Vico points out a total knowledge of mankind, which is closely related to the development of history.

Knowledge, Corporeity, Universali fantastici, Mankind, Needs.

The essay focuses on the importance that Bertrando Spaventa’s critical analysis on Spinoza assumes in the reflection of Giovanni Gentile. In particular, the work investigates the reasons for which Spaventa interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of immanence, elaborated in the light of the post-Hegelian discussion on the attributes, can be considered essential in Gentile’s attempt of reforming the dialectic towards a high emphasis in the act of thought as the sole constitutive activity of the being as becoming.

Italian Idealism, Hegel, Spinoza, Immanence, Dialectic.

This paper aims to exploit the concept of alienation to show some displacements within the Foucault’s relationship with the many-voiced constellation of French Hegelism. We will consider the following points: a) We will see how - despite Foucault’s statements about a complete break with the Hegelism since the 1950s - in his ‘Histoire de la folie’ we can still find a dialectical structure, a wide use of the concept of alienation, as well as several positive references to Hegel; b) We will then consider the conjunction between the content of the references to Hegel in Foucault’s doctoral thesis of 1961, and the reading of the German philosopher proposed by Jean Hyppolite, trying to sketch out some outlines of the French debate on Hegelism and the concept of alienation between the 1940s and 1950s; c) We will eventually address the complex relationship of proximity and distance between the “decentralization of the subject” proposed by the dialectical thought, and the theoretical anti-humanism supported by the epistemological-structuralist brand, on which Foucault’s and Althusser’s views seem to merge during the 1960s.

Alienation, hegelism, marxism, structuralism, dialectic, subjectivity

This paper aims to reconcile a theory of the self as a supervening abstract particular, or a property supervenient on physical properties, with a theory of the nuclear self. Besides a clarification on some difficult aspects of the mind/body problem, this reconciliation would contribute to an advancement of the debate on personal identity, because it would respect both the first-person and the third-person perspective, without confirming the existence of non-temporal substantial selves.

Supervenience, Emergentism, Self, Personal Identity, Mind/Body Problem

In this paper I show, using texts written prior to The Spirit of the Laws, how Montesquieu uses the notion of passion to solve the mind-body problem. By analysing how passions turn a mind condition into a body condition and the other way around, Montesquieu makes passion a central notion to understand human morality. As a consequence, law-making, to be efficient, has to take into account the body’s influence on moral dispositions by the mean of passions.

passions, laws, physiology, mind-body problem

The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Eduardo Arantes wrote the essay An Attempt to Identify French Ideology in Portuguese in 1990. Here an Italian translation is published with an introduction by Giovanni Zanotti. While the introduction outlines the broader context of Arantes’s philosophical reflection, the essay challenges the widespread conception of French post-structuralism as the theoretical counterpart of (American) post-modernism and lays down some preliminary coordinates for a possible alternative reading. First, the phrase “French ideology” – in the Marxian sense – is used to define the entire phase of French post-war thought that includes structuralism and post-structuralism, subsequent to the Sartrean “golden age of historical consciousness” and characterized by a cultural and political “narrowing of the horizon”. Secondly, such abstractness is traced back to the tradition of French and German cultural criticism – conceived in turn as an expression of the particular history of capitalist modernization in both countries. “French ideology” is thus explained as a late “recapitulation” of aesthetic modernism in a pseudo-theoretical form. In the last part of the essay, Arantes rejects any attempt to conflate the early Frankfurt School’s critique of domination with the post-structuralist deconstruction of power relations. Rather, he offers an Adornian interpretation of the two main currents in post-68 critical philosophy (“French theory” and the Habermasian school) as opposite poles of the same movement – not “modernity” versus counter-Enlightenment, but a further moment of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”, nevertheless lacking awareness of dialectics itself.

French theory; ideology; Habermas; dialectics; Brazilian philosophy

The paper examines the methodology Henry’s approach to Christianity is based on. Given the phenomenological conditions of such approach, the paper presents and discusses with references to some unpublished works, the vitalist naturalism that marks the tragic view of life and world Henry is supposed to have, and the wildly mystic and vitalist trait of his religious perspective.

Michel Henry, Religion, Christianity, Phenomenology of life.

The paper considers the relation between the concept of religion and the concept of truth in Michel Henry. It does so by situating the concept of truth with respect to the concept of untruth both in Henry’s early L’essence de la manifestation (1965) and his late C’est moi la vérité (1996). This situation affords a distinction, between an early, “reciprocal” relation between these two concepts and a late, “exclusive” relation between these two concepts. This distinction, in turn, affords an occasion for reflection on the mutual position of Christianity and a variety of its untruths – both internal and external – as depicted in this late text.

Michel Henry, religion, truth, untruth, phenomenology of life.

Based on unpublished archive materials, this paper reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the formation of Michel Henry’s phenomenology before the publication of L’essence de la manifestation (1963). The relationship between material phenomenology and philosophy of religion in Henry’s thought is then discussed in the light of the renewal of French philosophy that took place in the thirties and the forties of the last century, and that is the starting point for a comparison with German Idealism.

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, French Philosophy, German Idealism, Philosophy of Religion