Intersezioni | 2018 | N. 2

In accordance with the main lines followed by contemporary research, the aim of the present contribution is to provide an outline of the historiography on late-antique didactics, on the text of the Prolegomena to Plato’s philosophy, and on its anonymous author. The Prolegomena, which is to say the introduction to Plato and his dialogues that was in use in the Neoplatonist school of Alexandria in the mid-6th cent. AD, allow us better understand the structure and arrangement of the contents of Neoplatonist didactics. By examining some of the main aspects related to the teaching imparted in 5th and 6th-century philosophical schools, the paper studies the role that Plato and his dialogues played in late-antique ‘universities’. For this purpose, the paper sets out from some considerations on the history of education in order to then focus on the core theoretical features of the Prolegomena. Its ultimate aim is to demonstrate the centrality of Plato’s teaching and grasp the reasons for it through an introductory text that approaches the introduction as the literary topos par excellence.

The goals of this particular work are: (1) to introduce various aspects of Umberto Notari’s life together with a description of his involvement in the Italian politics; (2) to remark his challenge against partakers of the hypocritical and conventional Italian morality; (3) to point out a new meaning of the femininity concept. As a matter of fact, Notari declares that the 20th century woman not only could be a wife and a mother but also an economically indipendent-working woman within the industrial society.

By exploring the intellectual exchange between Croce and Praz, and by comparing their analyses on the Baroque, this article describes the clash between two incompatible positions, which characterised 20th-century Italian culture. Contrary to Croce’s moral and aesthetic convictions, this clash was due in particular to Praz’s belief that the significance of individuality was not to be found in relation to alleged historical universals, but rather in individuality per se, and only as a consequence in the specific «taste» that it reflected. The opposition between these views emerges with regard to the assessment of the Baroque in political and cultural terms. While baroque culture is dismissed by Croce as morally detestable and aesthetically distaste¬ful, it is praised instead by Praz, who considers it the forerunner of Romantic culture.

This analysis pursues a Lacanian approach and is aimed at historicizing the «obscure sickness» of Gonzalo Pirobutirro d’Eltino, the main character in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Acquainted with Grief, by locating its causes in the advent of monopolistic capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, given the emphasis it places on the role of linguistic and social relations (namely the symbolic order) in shaping the unconscious, allows to shed light on reasons for Gonzalo’s existential malaise that are not pre-eminently psychological, as the character strives to insinuate, but of a sociocultural nature.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the concept of «natural history» developed by Theodor W. Adorno in the beginning of his philosophical reflection. In general, I will focus on the conference The Idea of Natural History, given by Adorno in 1932. At first, I will stress the philosophical background of the concept of natural history and, in particular, I will focus on the relationship between Adorno’s comprehension of history and its ontological elaboration. Secondly, I will examine the birth of the concept of natural history in connection with Marxist and Hegelian reflection. At the end, I will scrutinize the 1932 conference by showing in which terms the category of «natural history» is able to define the most basic lines of the future development of Adorno’s thought.

This paper examines the status of homeopathic remedies by analysing the process-product dichotomy from a pragmatist point of view. The idea of the primacy of the process leads inevitably to the «is/ought fallacy»: that homeopathic remedies at ultra-high dilutions ought to be specific because the production process is specific. We can prevent this tendency by adopting the perspective of weak primacy of the product; while still being aware of the importance of the generative processes, this perspective considers the object-level detectable differences the decisive question at both a philosophical and social level.

In the era of the «to touch», the essay reflects on le toucher, dwelling on the notion of the caress. Going beyond the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s the visible and the invisible, Sartre’s petrifying look and Irigaray’s ethics of difference, and via a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, it intends to show how is it possible to reach a new understanding, starting from the stimulus originating from Levinas’ thought. From intentional touching to a gesture that initiates the «between the two», does the caress, taken as patience, perhaps not revive the original meaning of le toucher in what it is intact? Eros is to time as the caress is to patience: isn’t this the underlying equation of the «conscience bouleversée» of the flesh-and-blood ego that answers: «Me voici» to the other?