Intersezioni | 2020 | N. 1

Mathematicians become writers in several occasions. Indeed, not only demonstrations, but also conjectures, preliminary analyses of problems, syntheses of previous contributions, scientific controversies, foundational questions or, more in general,
research programmes and autobiographies can be seen as many forms of reasoning. Considering mathematicians as writers, we could thus examine what kind of style their works display: baroque and flowery, clear or neurotic, sloppy or elegant, dull
or rich in metaphors and figures of speech. Such differences can be spotted quite easily, but the question whether a specific style could be connected to a way of thinking – creative or meticulous, direct or involute – or even to a philosophy of mathematics stands undoubtedly as an interesting one.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Aby Warburg’s research on Giordano Bruno and Mithraic mysteries during his last journey to Italy with his young assistant Gertrud Bing. The article, supported by the notebook Giordano Bruno, the Tagebuch, the correspondence with Cassirer, and other documents, analyses Warburg’s thinking about similarities and differences between Mithraism and nova filosofia, with particular reference to the themes of sacrifice and light.

Theology of the Cross (Theologia Crucis) is a central aspect of Martin Luther’s theological research, expressed for the first time during the Heidelberg disputation (1518). In this paper, it is used as a hermeneutical principle to interpret some artistic works by Lorenzo Lotto and Johann Sebastian Bach. There are quite a few reasons to believe that the wood cross painted on the left side of Lotto’s Nativity (1523) was added after Lutheran ideas, coming from central Europe, had penetrated northern Italy.The same link between Christmas and Good Friday is also present in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (1734-1735): undoubtedly, in this case, one might read it considering Luther’s Theology of the Cross.

This essay intends to highlight the problematic relationship between debt and credit, guiltiness and punishment, sin and atonement, which are central issues both in Nietzsche’s and in Dostoevsky’s thought. Particular attention has been devoted to
some meaningful Nietzschean passages of Thus spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality and Twilight of the Idols, as well as to Dostoevsky’s novels Notes from the Underground, Notes from a dead house and mostly Crime and Punishment. This
study puts into question the correspondence between the transgression and the sanction through the analysis of the figures of the judge and the criminal in the light of criminal psychology. The traditional categories of law, based on this correspondence,
become problematic as they reveal that their objectivity is only presupposed.

The novel Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia is a major example of Leonardo Sciascia’s intertextual way of writing. Over the years, critical studies have emphasised the relationships between this book and literary texts to promote an investigation of the «heretic» nature of Candido, the novel’s hero, and to point out the author’s critical rewriting. However, it seems that Sciascia, to define the candour of Candido, stresses a second intertextual path, related to image and visual arts. Approaching this side of the novel, the essay focuses on the images of two sculptures that open and close the text and it studies their intertextual links and relationships with Sciascia’s critical essays on fine arts. Thus, this work outlines and analyses a visual layer involved in the building of the character’s sensitive and «heretic» way of life.

This article aims to investigate the attempt to recreate the Tarpan, a subspecies of the horse, definitively extinct in the nineteenth century. This primordial horse, Urwildpferde, fascinated many scientists since its discovery. Despite their extinction, tarpan horses still exist thanks to the work of three zoologists in the twentieth century. The Polish professor Tadeusz Vetulani tried to manage the regeneration using the forest of Białowieża, a simulacrum of the original European habitat. The Heck brothers chose another direction. Through the support of the Nazi government, they started a selective breeding process to restore the original tarpan horse, a practice called «breeding-back». Despite the exterior similarity, Heck horses are cultural simulations of the Tarpan, what we propose to call Ersatz, relating to the work of Philip Dick.

The article attempts to understand the reasons for the recent fortune of Kant’s anthropology. It is inspired by two recent publications of the Kantforschung, which study the relationship of anthropology with the theory of knowledge and ethics.
Both perspectives shed new light on critical philosophy, as an investigation into the powers and limits of reason, situated between the metaphysical dimension and sensitive conditioning. As a direct exploration of finiteness – that is, of what goes beyond man in different ways – anthropology shows what this border position really consists of and how to govern it, in philosophy as in life. In this way it also highlights the links of criticism with the humanistic tradition of virtues, civil and personal training, and, more generally, with the eighteenth-century human sciences.