Intersezioni | 2020 | N. 3

Ricordo di Andrea Battistini, scomparso il 30 agosto 2020

Plato’s literary conceptions of the Beyond of the human soul integrate the entire space of the cosmos and move the eschatological space of traditional Hades up to heaven. Astronomy is now combined in an idiosyncratic way with Platonic psychology, ethics, religion, and theology. Two strategies can be observed: the philosophical rationalization of ancient mythotopoi and a new religious conception of astronomy. Plato’s students in the Academy, such as the author of the Epinomis, Xenocrates, or Heraclides, place a much stronger emphasis on the religious aspects (astral gods) and undertake – and this is the reverse of Plato’s – a decidedly religious conception of Platonic philosophical concepts.

This article aims to explore the meanings of the atomistic metaphor in Hegel’s published works and academic courses. With the expression «system of atoms», Hegel does not address only to Democritus’ ancient doctrines concerning the aggregation of atoms, but also to a specific political system of the modern age: namely, that of the individualistic society, which has been developing since the fall of the Roman Empire. Hegel started employing the atomistic metaphor in Jena, when he described human associations with a scientific language taken from physical theories. Then, this connection is renewed in every following treatise as well as in the Berliner academic courses, in order to criticize a specific political model, that is Rousseau’s social contract.

This article focuses on an intellectual debate that arose in France from the discovery of the culprits of a horrific crime that happened in Lyon in 1692 by means of a divining rod, and which could highlight the impact that the new science had had on early modern mentality. Although this debate may appear to be a mere dispute between supporters of the natural origin of the power of the divining rod and supporters of a supernatural source of it, it will be demonstrated that the situation is much more complex, since both parties applied the same lens to read nature, i.e. mechanism. In this regard, it is worth noting that one of the consequences of extending mechanism to every aspect of reality is that some of those traditional supernatural entities, such as the devil, which Nicolas Malebranche among others used to justify the behaviour of the divining rod, were (re)introduced within a scientific explanation of nature.

The essay explores some aspects of the Zolian novel Au Bonheur des Dames, published in Paris by Charpentier in 1883. The first part focuses on some textual examples in which episodes, utterances and the action of the characters hide very different authorial intentions. So, behind the textual reality, the study of the preparatory papers allowed me to highlight the author’s desire to allegorize and create parallels. The second part aims to demonstrate the historical character of the novel. The authorial intention to express the entire century of social and economic transformations is therefore recognizable in the attempt to represent the characteristics of the ideology of progress, from the capitalist drive to the mutation of cities to proto-socialist demands.

Gabriel Séailles is an often neglected figure in Third Republic French philosophy. As Professor of history of philosophy at the Sorbonne and advocate of an aesthetic and moral education for the lower classes, he stands at the crossroad of many cultural trends of his time. This article accounts from both a theoretical and historical perspective for the deep entanglement between his aesthetic doctrine, notably his theory of genius, based on a recasting of Kantian-Schillerian elements, and his egalitarian conception of society.

Within the debate around the political emancipation of the Jews, Bruno Bauer and those intellectuals who took part in the cultural movement of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, were on opposing sides: the former was against the recognition of a full equality, whereas the latter were active supporters of the Jewish cause. How to explain such a great divide between those who were part of the same progressive German culture inherited from the Hegelian thought? Some volumes published on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Wissenschaft des Judentums foundation and the new Italian translation of Bauer’s Die Judenfrage, give us the opportunity to reflect again on that question. The essay highlights the innovative character of those works and elaborates on that moment of German history in which a conflict exploded, presenting from its beginnings divisions that were destined to burst in the following decades.