Intersezioni | 2023 | N. 3

Published exactly four centuries ago, Galileo’s Il Saggiatore (1623) originated from a dispute with Jesuit mathematician Orazio Grassi over the nature and motion of comets that appeared in the second half of 1618. Il Saggiatore, however, is much more than a work on comets. In numerous long digressions, Galileo analyzes various physical phenomena, where he expounds, for example, his conception of the structure of matter, based on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and explains the corpuscular nature of heat. In this way, Galileo took the opportunity to present his new natural philosophy, which, through a rigorously mathematical (according to the famous image of the book of nature) and empirically grounded approach, was a viable alternative to the traditional Aristotelian-scholastic system. The paper also shows how the comet debate had obvious cosmological implications, with Galileo’s attempt to give new life to Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, and emphasizes that Galileo ascribed to his comet theory not a value of absolute truth, but a hypothesis that could explain observational data.

In July 1353, Boccaccio sent Petrarch an indignant letter protesting that he had settled in the Visconti’s Milan, considering this an offense to the common homeland. From the predominant perspective in the critical literature, the letter has been considered as evidence of the political distance between the two authors, who are, in any case, united by a marked attention to the events of their time. A careful consideration of the text, in relation to the different contexts and time of writing, seem instead to indicate the absence of any effective political motivation in this polemic, as in any other decision of their lives. It is a suffered reflection on the duties of the intellectuals, that ends with the need for a radical disengagement from a hopelessly corrupt world.

The essay examines a few aspects of Cassirer’s theory of object, with specific reference to the differences between the Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff thesis and the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen thesis. If in his 1910 work Cassirer is mostly interested in defining a theory of the physical object, starting with the Faktum of natural science, with the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen the theory of object is integrated by an in-depth analysis of the forms of representation of the «thing» from the pre-scientific experience. One of the most relevant consequences of such extension of the theory of object is the ample space found, in Cassirer’s masterpiece, by a phenomenology of perception, which has the task of clarifying the function of perception processes in constituting the objects of our ordinary experience of the world.

Famiano Strada (1572-1649) was a Jesuit historian and writer who played an essential role in the Counter-Reformation period. This paper examines the representation of the perfect orator in the first book of his Prolusiones academicae, published in 1617 by Giacomo Mascardi in Rome. My primary focus is on the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy because the author drew inspiration from the works of Plato and Aristotle. Moreover, this article aims to shed light on further topics of interest, for example the importance of memory for the orator, the relationship between memory and intelligence, and the knowledge of various cultural fields. It is worth pointing out the author’s knowledge of ancient sources, which include not only Plato and Aristotle, but also Latin literature, in particular Cicero and Quintilian.

The article examines Isabelle de Charrière’s philosophical exploration of the notion of duty in her novel Trois femmes (written in 1794-1795). The textual analysis shows that her discourse on the subject, while stemming from an acquaintance with Kant’s moral doctrine, leads to a critique of its rigorism. This reflection seems to be the result of the acceptance and adoption in fiction of pedagogical and anthropological categories taken from Book IV of Rousseau’s Émile ou de l’éducation. In fact, it is based on Rousseau’s analysis of the role of compassion in the genesis of human morality that Charrière outlines an original idea of duty based on the aptitude for identify with the feelings of others.

This article aims to explore the perspective of interreligious dialogue of the Tunisian thinker Mohamed Talbi. For the author, religions have the potential to lay the theoretical foundations for a dialogue capable to create a shared world ethos. In discussing this pluralistic ethos, we will first focus on the peculiar hermeneutic method adopted by Talbi and defined by himself as the «intentional» or «vectorial» reading of the Koran. In a second step, then, we will proceed to show how this hermeneutic of dialogue must pass through a radical reflection on human nature and its freedom. Finally, we will show how, for Talbi, true faith in God must be understood as service rendered to one’s neighbor according to an idea of fraternity founded precisely on a principle of common humanity.