The paper analyses the idea of responsibility through the interpretation of the related concept of stupidity. What does stupidity mean? Trying to find answers to this apparent banal question will cast light on the idea of responsibility in its different forms.

Responsibility, stupidity, reason, moral judgement, guilt.

The paper analytically distinguishes four concepts of responsibility - causal responsibility, responsibility as a capacity, social responsibility and responsibility as a virtue - and considers the relationships among those different concepts.

causal responsibility, responsibility (capacity), social responsibility, responsibility (virtue).

This paper deals with the concept of moral responsibility. It defines moral responsiblity in its different faces from moral guilt to collective responsibility. In this perspective, the author analizes both its operating principles and the procedures of interrupting this inner dynamics. In the conclusion she draws the proposal of a new typology of this central but complex and ambiguous idea of moral theory.

Moral Responsibility, Collective Responsibility, Moral Guilt, Immagination, Moral Sentiments.

The paper focuses on the concept of responsibility in the original perspective of Hannah Arendt’s political reflection. Through a new interpretation of Arendt’s works it underlines the evolution of her thought with specific regard to the controversial relationship between personal responsibility and moral guilt on the ground of a changing idea of individual autonomy.

Personal responsibility, moral guilt, Arendt, Jaspers, totalitarianism.

The overcoming of the assumptions of the postmodernity and the return, with certain nuances, towards the illustrated values and towards the reflection about the connection between Ethics and Law, with the evolution towards the already called hypermodernity have caused a resurgence of the business ethics that seems to regain the lost prominence. The hypermodernity appeals to the ethics of the collective responsibility in which not everything is permitted, with a return to the ethical authentication of Law and Politics based on the public ethics that will involve, necessarily, the respect for certain standards of behaviour. The nature of this kind of rules, which refer us, constantly, to the ethics and to the peak of the so-called business ethics of the good government constitute an object of study in these new hypermodern times.

Hypermodernity, Modernity, Deontology, Public Ethics.

Connecting to theos, the greek term theoria means the large and complete vision of truth that contains all the events; this is the way in wich Aristotle ricreated the historic background of the development of philosophy. My pourpose is to examine a known argument about the existence of gods in order to qualify the eminence of wisdom as theoria, i. e. an exaustive view of all the different beings and the way to speak about them. The hypothesis is that god’s overlook is a kind of logic argument close to the paradox and it works only to banning the freedom knowledge because it was fighted by gods. The problem, rised from the lies of poets, regards the truth of divine revelation: the argument, that appears also in Plato’s Phaedrus, is connected with the god’s speach in the Poem of Parmenides. But according the interpretation that Aristotle gives of the eleatic theoria of being, Parmenides, in order to explain to the humans the necessity to recognize false perception of sensible phainomena, is forced to use falsehood in his speach.

gods, wisdom, theoria, language, falsehood, Parmenides, Heraclitus.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the connection, in Anselm of Canterbury, between theological issues, monastic culture and linguistic analysis. The reasoning is based on chapter thirteen of De veritate and develops the idea of truth without significatio that arises from those pages. Generally credited to the logical aspects of the Anselmian thought, the theory really needs to be understood in the light of the concepts of listening, silence, human and divine word, inside a tradition that traces its origins to Paul of Tarsus, Augustine and the Regula of Benedikt of Norcia. The analysis will show how the silence must be intended as a crucial notion in the Anselmian theory of truth. In this context, the meaning of silence is threefold: language of God, soundless language of the things and, finally, mental place where true propositions can be thought.

Anselm, Monastic culture, Silence, Truth, Language.

The Compendium Musicae (1618) by René Descartes (1596-1650) is usually interpreted as a model of mathematical treatise. Nevertheless, an analysis of his reception by the work of Bernard Lamy (1640-1715), in addiction to the highlighting of his classical sources (Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine of Hippo especially), discloses an underlying relationship with the prestigious science of rhetoric. In particular, in the III book of Lamy’s La Rhétorique ou l’Art de parler (1675) the analogies with the beginning (the first part, named Praenotanda) of Descartes’ Compendium clearly stand out and allow to redifine the connection between words and sounds, rhetoric and music.

Descartes, Lamy, music, rhetoric, Compendium musicae, aesthetics.

The essay proposes a reconsideration of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s thought, aiming at liberating it from the accusation of conservatism. Fichtian metaphysics is analyzed in order to recapture in it the origins of dialectic thought. The reflections on history, the defense of the French Revolution and the theoretical qualification of the relationship thought-praxis, show how in this philosophy the notion of “ideal” is given a transformative function of social and political reality towards an implementation of freedom. The concluding part of the essay makes a comparison between the Fichtian notion of ideal with the concept of concrete utopia formulated by Ernest Bloch.

French Revolution, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ernst Bloch, Political Idealism, Marxism.

Living space (Lebensraum) provides the junction point between an historical ontology and effective history. It is, in a sense, the space where speculative influences originating from Heidegger, Dilthey, and Marx mould the background of Marcuse’s early thought. Generally speaking, living space proves that events do not obey their own idealized logic, but always participate in our own living experience. Thus, even when it gets reified, the notion of living space preserves in itself an element of freedom. This notion, that is more and more thought of in connection with work, becomes increasingly less pervasive, and eventually disappears fromMarcuse’s works after 1933. But the motives that led to its conception still remain, and shall affect Marcuse’s later thought.

Living space, radical action, work, history, ontology, Heidegger, Dilthey.

Croce’s and Gentile’s neo-idealistic philosophy – the philosophical movement prevailing in Italian academy during the early decades of 20th century – had suggested an extratemporal dimension of history. After the 2nd world war Italian philosophers undertook a debate about historiography, and the problem of time was one of the main subjects of the quarrel. Examining the arguments advanced by some of the chief participants of the debate – Mario Dal Pra, Antonio Banfi, Giulio Preti, Paolo Rossi, Eugenio Garin, Enzo Paci, Nicola Abbagnano – this article analyzes the mephysical and epistemic assumptions that each of them conceived, in order to set up an idea of time such as to enable a better appreciation of philology (historical time) and of experimantal sciences (empirical time).

Neo-idealism, Neoilluminismo (New Enlightenment), Italian philosophical historiography, Historical time, Empirical time.

The essay considers Gilles Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza (Spinoza and the Problem of Expression and Spinoza. Practical Philosophy) and both the elements of continuity among the different Deleuzian readings of Spinoza and the specific differences of each work are highlighted. It will be observed how in the two works there is a strong attention towards the Spinozian concepts of immanence and univocity. However, if the first one has a certain structuralist setting out in the reading of Deleuze, this characteristics seems to weaken progressively, in favor of an understanding of Spinoza’s thought as a practical philosophy and ethics that is primarily open to the experience of singularity. The Deleuzian interpretation of Spinoza is reconstructed in its internal logics, but also on the background of the French philosophical historiography on the author, that is coeval to Deleuze’s volumes.

Spinoza, Deleuze, Structuralism, Immanence, Ethics, Expression.