Intersezioni | 2022 | N. 3

After a brief exposition of the work El Imperio de la China, by Jesuit Álvaro Semedo, I examine elements of the elocution of the historical and geographical genres, the moralizing purpose of the 1600s, the relationship of historical discourse with rhetoric and poetics, as well as the understanding of its post-Tridentine evangelizing cause, to understand the possibilities of truth in History.

The aim of this article is to analyze Madame Roland’s Mémoires to bring out the peculiarity of the female viewpoint here adopted. The article starts from Madame Roland’s vocation for private writing, it then focuses on her expository strategies and her contribution to the historical and political spheres, and it finally tackles the more strictly autobiographical part of her work. It is precisely the distinctiveness of the female viewpoint that allows the author to overcome the rigid dichotomy between public and private sphere. The merging together of these two spheres was indeed what allowed women to actively intervene in the political dimension, while disguising their intervention.

The relationship between Heine and Marx in Paris between 1843 and 1844 is the story of an extraordinary intellectual consonance. Heine’s concepts find space in Marx, those of Marx in Heine, like a thick web of references. Above all, the concept of «comedy», taken up critically by the Hegelian theorization. Not tragedy, Heine argues, but farce contrasts with comedy. This way of redefining the classic aesthetic plexus is now charged with pregnant political contents: in Heine as in Marx is in question a radical interpretation of one’s historical time. Heine, in particular, uses it to elaborate a complex (and original in many ways) theory of revolution, the influence of which leaves a consistent and problematic trace even in the mature Marx.

The article focuses on the ways in which the nascent Italian eugenics interpreted and used the idea of degeneration in the period between 1889, the year of publication of Human Degenerations by the anthropologist and psychologist Giuseppe Sergi, and 1911, when the psychiatrist Pietro Petrazzani published a book with the same title. This debate on degeneration was influenced by Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution and by European psychiatric and sexological thought and was characterized by a continuous oscillation between the importance attributed to the environment and that of inheritance without a clear choice in favor of one or the other aspect. The analysis allows to affirm that in early Italian eugenics the push for social reform was accompanied by the request for repressive measures and that the concept of Latin eugenics is not entirely appropriate for understanding the complexity of the Italian experience.

Probing a case study of current public debate, I will examine the referential and performative status of the language of historiographical narratives. In detail, I will frame this topic within a dispute that saw historians such as Arnaldo Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg opposing Hayden White’s linguistic turn of postmodern historiography. To abandon the fictionalist features attributed to this latter tradition, I will present a parallel between historical narratives and novels in the light of the linguistic notion of «opacity». Then, I will show a possible conception of the opacity of historiographical language by displaying different theoretical approaches, such as that of novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, the view of Frank Ankersmit, exponent of the linguistic turn, and the analytical references of philosopher of literature Peter Lamarque.

The article deals with the discovery of the cognitive unconscious and its philosophical implications. In particular, we focus on the impact of the cognitive unconscious processes on the reliability of first-person accounts concerning the motivations for one’s actions. The first section of the essay analyzes the emergence of the cognitive unconscious during the 20th century and presents some studies that have paved the way for its recognition. In the second section, an experiment, often neglected, conducted by Charles Peirce and Joseph Jastrow and published in 1885 is presented. The experiment preceded the discovery of the existence of unconscious cognitive abilities in man. At the same time, it is shown how this experiment may also suggest a different interpretation of the role of these unconscious processes and of the relationship between them and the so-called personal level of description and explanation.

The article argues that, in some crucial passages of his work of the Sixties and Seventies, and especially in Parts One and Four of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell reinterprets topics from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy through the lens of the ideas and more generally a conception of the human extrapolated from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Intertwining conceptual, contextual and genetic analysis, the article focuses in particular on Cavell’s understanding of the notions of criteria, acknowledgment, world, forms of life, avoidance, finitude, expression, private language and anxiety. Attention is paid to the divergences between the meta-philosophical assumptions of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the significance of Cavell’s partial shift from the first to the second in the elaboration of his own humanistic idea of philosophy. It is also suggested that his existential reinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy is the core intuition behind the notion of perfectionism that interested Cavell from the late Eighties onwards.