This paper was held by Franco Farinelli in his latest Seminar on 17 October 2018 at the Department of Philosophy and Communication of Bologna of which he was the outgoing Director. It focuses on the main thesis of his forthcoming book, which concerns the relationship between the mind and the city. Through an original reconstruction of the whole history of civilization to the present day, the Autor tries to demonstrate that in the Modern world the mind and the city, the mental dimension and the urban one have become the same thing.

Political geography, City, Mind, Mapping, Globalization.

In this paper we intend to investigate the meaning of the loss of the self and how it is possible for the subject to reactivate, through an externalist procedure, his cognitive faculties. Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae is the story of the journey made by the subject from the self-forgetfulness, through re-appropriation of the cognitive faculties, obtained thanks the acts of reading the words enregistered into the Consolatio Philosopiae, following the capacity to reach, and having an epistemic knowledge of theological truths in the Opuscula Sacra.

Medieval Philosophy, Late ancient Philosophy, Belief and Epistemic logic, History of Reading, History of Ideas, Subject, Boethius, Consolatio hilosophiae, Opuscula Sacra.

We present a reading of the poem Architrenius by Johannes de Hauvilla in the context of the twelfth-century debate on dualist heresy. We argue that the dialogue between man and Nature in Johannes’ poem can be read as a quaestio de providentia between a potential dualist heretic and Christian orthodox. In particular we claim that the basic tenets expressed by the main character are typical of what contemporary anti-heretical writers called “Manichaeism”. On the other hand the views expressed by Nature match anti-dualistic arguments common in twelfthcentury anti-heretical literarure.

Architrenius, Providence, Manichaeism, Nature, XII century philosophy.

Siger of Brabant sketches in his Quaestiones in tertium de anima (ca. 1269) a noetic theory defending the unity of the intellect that is usually considered as a latin formulation of Ibn Rušd’s theory of the separateness of the material intellect as put forth in the Long Commentary on the De anima (ca. 1186). A closer look at key texts in both the Quaestiones and the Long Commentary will give us a quite different picture: while Siger works out his theory on the background of a dualistic anthropology that takes the union between the intellective soul (conceived as an hoc aliquid) and the human body to be only operational, Ibn Rušd (who develops his theory starting from strictly aristotelic epistemological premises) repeatedly stresses throughout the Long Commentary that, if man is an agent of thought, the union between the separate intellects and the thinking individual ought to be always hylomorphic. This paper aims at showing that, although Siger has often been identified as an averroist, his psychology is certainly not rushdian.

Material Intellect, Ibn Rušd, Siger of Brabant, Mind-Body Dualism, Hylomorphism.

This article aims to analyze the Flavio Querenghi’s conception of medicine, a topic neglected in critical studies about this author. What emerges from a careful reading of his Discorsi morali politici et naturali is both a critique of medical science and the will to establish a different kind of medicine. Next to the pars destruens, that is strongly influenced by the reading of the Michel de Montaigne’s brief history of medicine (Essais, II, 37), comes the pars construens, strongly related to the author’s metaphysical doctrine of pre-established harmony between natural beings. This is the starting point of the birth of a new medicine, which consists in the substitution of medical authority and drugs for autarchy and natural medicines.

Flavio Querenghi, Montaigne, Medicine, Nature, Autarchy.

The emancipation of the secular from religious authority is a pivotal element in the development of modern States. This process is achieved, through the incorporation of religious power by the civil authority. However, from an intellectual point of view this requires the construction of an alternative political theology and ecclesiology. Paolo Sarpi and Thomas Hobbes are two of the intellectual protagonists of this historical and cultural phenomenon, and both reflect largely on the meaning of the word “church”, on the functions of religious authority, and on the nature of the sanctions that this authority can impose, first of all, excommunication. Both authors had also the same polemical target: Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino and his theory of potestas indirecta. Both thinkers also had access to common sources especially Marsilio da Padova. However, similarities in the arguments proposed by these authors against Bellarmino, are such as to suggest that some of Sarpi’s texts may have influenced Hobbes’s ideas.

Sarpi, Hobbes, Marsilio da Padova, Bellarmino, Church.

In the period between the second half of the Seventeenth and the first half of the Century, one of the topics that especially interested Italian intellectuals was the one regarding the problem of language and its role in the field of knowledge. This theme was interwined with the need to cope with the more and more invasive presence of French which, with its features of sobriety and essentiality, seemed to embody those ideals of clearness and rationality advocated by Cartesianism and the Logique from Port-Royal. This essay, by starting from such premises, emphasizes how Vico had felt the need to reach this strictly rationalistic view since his first works, even though it was mainly in his masterpiece, Scienza nuova, that the Neapolitan philosopher showed it was fantasy and not reason to be at the roots of human language. The myths of the first men, called Universali fantastici, represented something similar to a “Common Dictionary of Mankind”, which was based on fantasy, metaphor, wit, memory and rhetoric procedures. All these features were not to be refused as they, more than reason, were rooted in those characteristics that were typical of mankind.

Language, Reason, Port-Royal, Rhetoric, Myths.

This paper wants to show how nature and method play a central role in Sydenham’s medical conception and practice. For this reason, the first part of this study analyzes the nature by two perspectives: metaphysical and epistemological. Clarified this relation, it is possible to trace the characteristics of Sydenham’s clinical method and its peculiarities. Moving from that, the second part gives an account of the physiological conception displayed in curing small-pox, hysteria and hypochondria. A physiological reconstruction that is part of the epistemological conception of nature.

Thomas Sydenham, Nature, Method, Medicine, Small-pox, Hysteria, Hypochondria, Medical Practice, Empiricism.

Within the phenomenological horizon of his time, Kandinsky is ideally placed in an intermediate position between Husserl and Scheler, which respectively assign primacy to the subject or the object. At the center of his reflection, the inner necessity is above all of the life in general, but then by adhering to the soul it is refined and becomes subjective. Thus it appears within the abstract artwork. It is in its manifestations: in color, in sound, in the line. In things that are in creation, not in perception. The artist, giving it to her purity, puts herself at the service of the divine.

Kandinsky, Husserl, Scheler, Art, Phenomenology, inner Necessity, Life.

With this contribution I propose to rediscover the value of Weilian political and moral the thought. To this end, I will divide my essay in two parts: the first, in which I will refer to the re-interpretation of Aristotelian thought developed by the author; a second in which I will try to highlight those characteristics of modern society that Weil always kept in mind, through original reconciliation of Kantian and Hegelian thought. The issue is that the author did not cease to make dialogue with those of the ancient world: the Weilian thought, then, cannot no open itself to an essentially meta-philosophical perspective.

Ancient World, Modern Society, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel.

One of the nodal issues problematized in the twentieth century was the crisis of the human dimension to the point of hypothesizing the alleged “death of man”. What I will try to develop in this work is a representation of the concept of technical Bildung as a possible new formative and interpretative paradigm of the dimension of human subjectivity, through some passages of the thought of three particularly significant authors in this debate: Spengler, Jünger, Anders. I will then show how the contemporary debate collects the results of the problems raised by this tradition of thought: in this case transhumanism – with particular attention to the interpretation offered by Riccardo Campa – and the posthumanism of Roberto Marchesini. The purpose of this paper will be to highlight and turn the screw on the interpretation made by the authors with the hope of understanding if the re-reading of the human paradigm, offered by these multiple voices, is really in contrast with the old humanist approaches or it is still based on the same perspective. Does man’s crisis actually produce decisive effects for a re-reading of the identity dimension that cannot be interpreted as human anymore? What is then a man? Non-human? Inhuman? Transhuman? Posthuman?

Humanism, Bildung, Transhuman, Posthuman, Eco-philosophy.