Intersezioni | 2018 | N. 1

This article examines views of the tension between righteous wrath and per¬sonal resentment in Elizabethan discourses of justice. Two significant sets of texts, Edmund Spenser’s poem “The Faerie Queene”, and Queen Elizabeth I’s writings are analysed in their philosophical, legal and theological contexts. Mastery over vengeful wrath and rancorous feelings is a litmus test of the Spenserian heroes’ fashioning as virtuous individuals ready to embrace the spiritual, moral and social responsibilities of their quests. Reflections on the ethical and political polarity of private vengeance and justified punishment, vengeful resentment and rightful indignation are also at the core of Elizabeth I’s rhetorical self-portrait as an exemplary champion of justice.

According to the Italian intellectual Rocco Montano, the typical dysfunctions relating to modern democracies can be reduced to the dissipation of an institutionally constructed moral consensus due to political partisanship. This analysis finds proof in recent phenomena of post-democracy, as well as in Antonio Rosmini’s and Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of civil society. All three thinkers maintain that an intellectual elite is an essential prerequisite for the stabilizing of such a consent, which according to Montano and Rosmini should be institutionally guaranteed by a Second Chamber of Parliament, not by party agitation. Further research about the importance of religious tradition for such pre-political moral consensus also leads to the reflections of Wilhelm Röpke and Jürgen Habermas.

In this article we claim that the aesthetic interest of traditional fiction films does not only consist in the dramatic representation they record (as influentially claimed by Roger Scruton), but also in the cinematic presentation of their portrayed subjects as detached from the spectator’s environment. In arguing for this claim, we refer to some remarks that can be found in Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and other early work.

By assuming the contemporary theory of biological complexity as the theoretical reference point, this paper aims to highlight the interdisciplinary research outcomes of late Kauffman. In particular, this essay examines in depth the fundamental concepts of autonomous agent, propagating work, and embodied information deeply connected within a multidimensional and hierarchical epistemological framework. In this perspective, the paper outlines a concept of information as constraints on the release of energy that constitutes work, assuming the hypothesis that natural selection maximizes the diversity of work in living systems. Moreover, the article underlines the need to identify new informational measures of biological complexity – measures that cannot concern only statistical rarity or computational incompressibility.

This paper describes a passage of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana” – the famous description of a mannerist painting representing the saints Peter and Paul – as an example of the Neo-baroque style of writing. In synergy with the recent scholarship on the Neo-Baroque world as well as with theo¬ries on the «anachronism of images», the essay suggests that this literary technique, consisting in overwriting poverty and vacuity with an abundance of signs, is aimed at exploring emancipatory versions of the past. The origins of this aesthetic strategy can be traced back to Gadda’s unfinished novel “Racconto italiano di ignoto del Novecento”. The conclusion of this paper underlines the new light shed by this approach on the ‘vexata quæstio’ on Gadda’s literary style («of words» vs «of things»).

The extraordinary experiments of Nambu-Goldstone ‘boson’; the Leibniz’s concept of ‘monad’; the aristotelian-thomistic concept of ‘essence’ (nature): three descriptions of reality which can converge. Three results of the scientific research and philosophical thought distant over time, language and cultural context, but complementary to each other. We can compare these for a more appropriate understanding of reality. In 21th century, Physics and Philosophy can work together: Physics provides new meanings to philosophical words; Philosophy provides new perspectives through which investigate the reality.

The aim of this article is to show the philosophical outcome achieved by a new way of writing about the history of sexuality. Starting from the well-known Foucauldian «archaeological method» and by employing many typical tools developed by Hacking’s «historical epistemology», the author claims that Arnold I. Davidson designs a new historiographical theory based on the idea of «Styles of Reasoning». Through the analysis of the concept of «Styles», Davidson traces the history of a peculiar concept, namely that of «sexual instinct» – from the accounts of the French anatomist C.F. Michéa and the psychiatric theories of R. von Krafft-Ebing, up to the Freudian thought. The article focuses on the relevance of the period between 1850 and 1905, during which a very impressive paradigm shift in the subfields of medical and psychiatric disciplines occurs. Thus, this essay analyses, from a philosophical viewpoint, the «truth-or-falsehood» of the concepts involved in the macro-category of «Styles of Reasoning».