Intersezioni | 2021 | N. 2

The letters Goethe and Schiller exchanged between 1794 and 1805 document their collaboration. In this time span, Goethe redefines the main axes of his aesthetics with the aim of balancing the category of artifice and the traditional assumptions on the imitation of nature. According to Goethe, the artist is required to shape matter without letting it dissolve in an abstract and intangible dimension; at the same time, he should follow the principle that nature is fruitful as an aesthetic object only when submitted to a rigorous selection process.

Mach greatly admired Helmholtz’s 1863 book on tone sensations, which he popularized in Austria. However, Mach also suggested some amendment. In his view, Helmholtz was wrong in assuming that a single sensory energy corresponds to each different pitch. Initially, Mach explored an alternative physiological explanation, pointing at the role of muscular sensations. Subsequently, he envisaged a more sophisticated mechanism based upon supplementary auditory sensations. Insisting, against Helmholtz, that invariant patterns recur within auditory appearance, unexpectedly Mach ended by paving the way to gestalt approaches in psychology.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an ontological account for the many theoretical frameworks that have characterized, characterize and will characterize the geographical investigation. The account combines the demands of two ontological positions, namely perspectivism and variantism. By following perspectivism, we will consider ontology as a tool to provide platforms for describing and integrating all the different geographical investigations, areas of research, and points of view. In accordance with variantism, we will circumscribe the plurality of those platforms, by addressing the possibility of (their) transformation over time.

The story of Pinocchio is part of a long tradition of myths about the animation of the inorganic, the archetype of which is the story of Pygmalion. However, from his very first appearance in the book, when he is still a piece of wood, Pinocchio manifests the opposite prerogative of reducing what is endowed with life to the inorganic; rather than «Pygmalion effect», we should speak of «Medusa effect». In addition, the animation rituals performed in the first chapters are characterised by a parodic quality that casts doubt on any human claim to bring the living into being. By narrating the adventures of his puppet, Collodi problematically confronts a question that has become a burning issue at the time, with the affirmation of pre-cinematographic techniques of image animation, to which reference is made several times in the book. The conclusion of the story alludes to a solution that rejects both the hybris of the sorcerer’s apprentices of the living and the renunciation of a relationship with images as living realities.

Russell and De Giorgi’s approaches, starting from the logical limitations established by Gödel, appear to be unusually divergent. De Giorgi’s ultra-experimental technique will end up opposing to Russell’s theory of types – paradoxically close to certain Thomistic solutions – a formulation free from scholasticism; similarly, the ambitions of Pythagorean completeness present in Russell are replaced, in De Giorgi’s philosophy, with an adherence to insolubility as a guarantee of transcendence. «God cannot be reduced to the “first self-understanding entity”». With this judgment of strict scientific observance, and only apparent religious apostasy, De Giorgi is girding to rethink the conditions of mathematical formalism from within.

The plays composed by Shakespeare after 1603 incorporate the principles of the new Stuart ideology, which celebrated James I as an enlightened ruler. In this respect, it is possible to read Antony and Cleopatra as a representation of the Stuart court’s rituals, its policy and its language. By offering a reading from a doctrinal perspective, this contribution aims to demonstrate how Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony mirror, respectively, the positive and negative qualities of the new English monarchy: the former embodies cardinal virtues as well as a model of conduct that a princeps must exhibit, if he wants to state his authority. Conversely, the latter illustrates the harmful consequences that a leader can cause when he is more focused upon quenching his vicious pleasures than managing power.

Using Saul Kripke’s well-known book Wittgenstein on rules and private language as a starting point, this article focuses on the way Stanley Cavell, in his second Carus lecture performed for the American Philosophical Association in 1988, undermines Kripke’s approach, offering a perspective that seems closer to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The scope of such a comparison between Kripke and Cavell though is not philological but conceptual: to expose and overcome a certain picture of language. By concentrating on the ability to put words to new uses («word projection»), Cavell offers a radically different account of how we operate with words, conceiving language in more improvisatory terms, as always open and vulnerable to unexpected turns.