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Matteo d'Acquasparta vs Tommaso d'Aquino. Ilemorfismo metafisico e immortalità dell'anima (review)la Cultura 3 531-539. 2012.
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The Principles of Angelic Self-Knowledge. From Thomas Aquinas to João PoinsotMedioevo e Rinascimento 291-310. forthcoming.This paper delves into a pivotal issue of scholastic angelology, the problem of angelic self-knowledge. It compares positions ranging from Thomas Aquinas’s to João Poinsot’s. I stress in particular what I dub ‘the problem of immanent knowledge in presence’, i.e. the problem of the actual, immanent and presential interplay between the angelic intellect and the angelic substance, which Aquinas sees as the rationale for angelic self-knowledge. I then discuss the perspectives of Cajetan and Vázquez,…Read more
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Il teatro cartesiano: sulla funzione della "teatralità" barocca nella Prima Meditazione di DescartesIn Luca Viglialoro & Marco Gatto (eds.), L'esperienza dell'arte. Un percorso estetico tra moderno e postmoderno. pp. 21-55. 2011.Rintracciare con esattezza, nelle Meditazioni, la presenza di specifiche fonti letterarie è un'impresa audace e per certi versi poco utile. Considerata la riluttanza di Descartes a sottomettere il proprio pensiero a ogni genealogia e preso atto dello straordinario eclettismo che anima il Barocco (categoria culturale oltretutto sfuggente per definizione), sembra vano un tentativo di fissare definitivamente i richiami e le atmosfere che attraversano l'opera. Il rischio è anzitutto quello di mante…Read more
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Henri Bergson, Storia dell'idea di tempo. Corso al Collège de France 1901-1902 (edited book)Mimesis. 2019.Il corso sulla Storia dell'idea di tempo, tenuto al Collège de France nel 1902-1903, per la prima volta tradotto interamente in italiano, è dedicato al concetto di tempo nella storia della filosofia antica e moderna. In queste straordinarie lezioni Bergson si confronta con Platone, Aristotele, Plotino, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton e Kant. Nel cuore della metafisica occidentale il filosofo francese intravede una fondamentale negazione del tempo, impropriamente considerato come imi…Read more
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Review of Francesco Cerrato, "Un secolo di passioni e politica. Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza", DeriveApprodi 2012 (review)Lo Sguardo - Rivista di Filosofia 13 435-438. 2013.
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Errata naturae. Cause prime e seconde del mostro biologico tra medioevo ed età modernaLo Sguardo. Rivista di Filosofia 9. 2012.According to one of the most influential definitions, formulated by Michel Foucault in his Les anormaux, the monster is, since the Middle Ages, a violation of a “bio-juridical” order. In critically discussing the historical plausibility of this claim this article explores medical and philosophical conceptions of monsters between medieval and early modern period, addressing in particular the matter of the relationships between first and second causes in nature's errors. The main authors dealt wit…Read more
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IntroductionIn Simone Guidi & Joaquim Braga (eds.), The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Intersections of Medicine and Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1-50. 2023.This volume sets out to chart a path at the intersection between the histories of medicine and philosophy concerning a topic that is prominent in contemporary debates, i.e. the translation of physiology, and accordingly pathology, into numerical terms. In particular, the book discusses and contextualizes issues that are simultaneous of medical and philosophical import, such as the quantification of temperaments and complexions, the quantification of life processes and physiology, the quantificat…Read more
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Mechanism Prehistory and the ‘Strange Case’ of Marin Cureau de La ChambreIn Nicole Dalia Cilia & Luca Tonetti (eds.), Wired Bodies. New Perspectives on the Machine-Organism Analogy, . 2017.This article deals with the concept of “mechanism” from a historical point of view, focusing on its relationship with the evolution of hylomorphism in the 17th century. I try to address the following questions: is mechanism structurally bound to materialism or does it rather represent a form of complete determinism, reconcilable with an “updated” version of hylomorphism? In the first part of the essay, I make the point that the very notion of “mechanism” must be clarified by means of a distincti…Read more
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Pedro da Fonseca on Substance, Subsistence, and SuppositIn Simone Guidi & Mario Santiago Carvalho (eds.), Pedro da Fonseca. Humanism and Metaphysics, Brepols. 2023.Twenty years before Suárez’s Metaphysicae disputationes, Pedro da Fonseca offered one of the most impressive modern attempts to reorder Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In the present chapter, I will endeavour to show how insightful Fonseca’s effort truly was, by dealing with his ousiology. I will focus especially on the Jesuit’s account of three pivotal concepts in the scholastic theory of substance, i.e. Divine Substance, created substance and prime substance, or supposit. These notions are primarily …Read more
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Substantia completa. Descartes e la separazione ontologica della res cogitans nella Meditatio SextaIl Cannocchiale 38 33-62. 2013.Al principio della Meditatio Sexta, tappa conclusiva del capolavoro di Descartes, si schiude una frattura fondamentale. È quella tra intelletto e immaginazione, autentica premessa per la dimostrazione – a cui l’opera cartesiana punta sin dal titolo – della distinzione reale di mente e corpo. Come d’altra parte Descartes sottolinea già nella Synopsis (sconfessando alcune interpretazioni odierne), la reciproca alterità ontologica tra le due res non viene garantita a seguito dell’approdo al punto …Read more
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Ratio Mundi. Possible Cosmologies Between Narrative and Logic (edited book)Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. 2014.The issue addresses the relationship between cosmology and ratio, or the dialectical and structural connection which links the same definition of “world” as a uniform, homogeneous, coherent and possible system with the very logical and narrative (and then uniform, homogeneous, coherent and possible) character of our rational description of it. Otherwise, every ratio mundi – understood both in a metaphysical or in an epistemological or in a phenomenological way – amounts, really because it is a r…Read more
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Review of Marin Cureau de La Chambre, "Quale sia la conoscenza degli animali e fin dove possa estendersi", a cura di Emanuela Scribano, Felici Editore 2010 (review)Lo Sguardo - Rivista di Filosofia 6. 2011.
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Reason, Phantasy, Animal Intelligence. A few remarks on Suárez and the Jesuit debate on the internal sensesIn Pedro Caridade de Freitas, Ana Isabel Fouto & Margarida Seixas (eds.), Suárez em Lisboa 1617 - 2017. Actas do Congresso,. 2019.This paper addresses Suárez’s understanding of imagination and phantasy, dealing with it in the general Aristotelian debate on the internal senses. Paragraph 1 sketches Aristotle’s, Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s accounts of imagination, examining especially the boundary between human and animal cognition. Paragraph 2 addresses especially the Jesuits’ understanding of the topology of the internal senses, linking it with the Jesuit strategy for the demonstration of the soul’s immateriality and immortal…Read more
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Review of Iacopo Chiaravalli, L'oggetto puro. Matematica e scienza in Descartes (review)Rivista di Filosofia 1 168-171. 2022.
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Epigenesis and Generative Power in Descartes's Late Scholastic SourcesIn Fabrizio Baldassarri (ed.), Descartes and Medicine: Problems, Responses and Survival of a Cartesian Discipline, Brepols. pp. 59-79. 2023.What does Descartes's embryology look, if related to the Scholastic theories of his time? In order to reply to this question, the present chapter aims at sketching a portrait of the embryological epigenetics Descartes could find in his recognized Scholastic sources (the Commentaries on Aristotle by Toledo, the Coimbra Jesuits, Suárez, and Rubio, as well as the Summae by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo and Abra de Raçonis), a tradition that received and incorporated in the Aristotelian-Galenic body man…Read more
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«Magnae dignitati est in rationali natura subsistere». Aquinas’ notion of «person» and the ontology of spiritual substancesDivus Thomas 121 208-218. 2018.The essay deals with Aquinas’theory of person, focusing especially on the relevance of this qualification in Saint Thomas’ theory of the «spiritual substances», on his rejection of Platonism and on his peculiar use of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of the intellecitve substances. We especially stress that Aquinas’functionalist theory of person places the concept of «dignity» as the ultimate foundation of rationality, understanding the latter as a specific assignement and a specific responsibility in …Read more
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Separated soul and its nature: Francisco Suárez in the scholastic debateIn Robert A. Maryks, Senent de Frutos & Juan Antonio (eds.), Francisco Suárez (1548-1617): Jesuits and the complexities of modernity, Brill. 2019.
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Henri Bergson, Lezioni di Metafisica. Spazio, tempo, materia e teorie dell'anima (edited book)Mimesis. 2018."Lezioni di metafisica" presenta tradotti per la prima volta in italiano due cicli di lezioni tenuti da Henri Bergson presso la classe di khâgne del Lycée Henri-IV, tra il 1893 e il 1894. Per la loro collocazione temporale, a cavallo tra gli anni del "Saggio sui dati immediati della coscienza" (1889) e "Materia e memoria" (1896), queste lezioni risultano di straordinario interesse per gli studi sul filosofo francese, che vi sviluppa un serrato confronto con la storia della metafisica moderna e…Read more
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Review of Francesca Bonicalzi, Silvano Facioni (eds), "L'intrico dell'io", Jaca Books 2014 (review)Lo Sguardo - Rivista di Filosofia 17 465-471. 2015.--
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Memory and Philosophy. Vol. 1. Individual Memory Between Cognition and Individuation (edited book)Lo Sguardo. 2019.Why do we remember? And, for that matter, what is remembering? Placed between body and mind, the phenomenon of memory simultaneously involves biological, psychological, semiotic, and metaphysical elements. Memory’s place at the heart of our understanding of ourselves is why many of the greatest philosophers of all the time have dealt with the problem – or, better, have had to deal with it. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Russell, and Wittgenstein, are just a …Read more
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Review of Loana Liccioli, "Medicina More Mechanico. La fisiologia di Descartes", Archetipolibri 2011 (review)Lo Sguardo - Rivista di Filosofia 9. 2012.
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Review of Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant. Introduction (première et deuxième parties), introduction par Caterina Zanfi (review)Dianoia: Rivista di filosofia 32. 2022.
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Data vs. Mathesis. Contrasting Epistemologies in Some Mechanizations and Quantifications of MedicineIn Simone Guidi & Joaquim Braga (eds.), The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Intersections of Medicine and Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 201-240. 2023.In this chapter I argue that the general category of 'iatromechanics' conceals different views about how mathematics and mathematical physics should be applied in medicine, and thereby about how physiology should be quantified and mathematized. Mechanism, quantification and mathematization are indeed different, albeit interrelated, notions, which overlap without ever coming to be identical, and all of which depend upon the overall epistemological debate over the method for finding truth in scien…Read more
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Il potere delle passioni. Descartes antropologo politicoLo Sguardo. Rivista di Filosofia 13. 2013.Did Descartes ever develop a political thought of his own? This question, still open in the field of cartesian studies, is maybe doomed to remain without a definitive answer, mainly because of the lack of a specific work dedicated by him to politics. Nevertheless, we have a long letter to Princess Elisabeth in which the French philosopher, starting from his reading of Machiavelli's masterpiece, Il Principe, discusses political matters, and especially the political instruments that a good prince …Read more
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«Solo lumine naturae utens». Suárez e la ratio angeli_: note su _DM 35, 1-3In Simona Langella & Cintia Faraco (eds.), Francisco Suárez 1617-2017. Atti del Convegno in occasione del IV centenario della morte, Artetetra Edizioni. 2019.Suárez’s primary attempt to rethink angelology can be found in the De Angelis. This work is a mighty commentary on the prima pars of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (qq. 50-64) which Suárez left to his colleagues after his years in Coimbra (1597-1607), and which was published posthumously in Lyon in 1620. The composition of the text is somewhat stratified and it includes many references to the Disputationes Metaphysicae, but Suárez most likely already started writing it during his years of teaching in…Read more
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Lux sive qualitas. Incorporeità ed estensione della luce nell’aristotelismo iberico e italiano di primo SeicentoGalilaeana. Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Science 15 61-81. 2018.This article addresses the Aristotelian debate in the 17th century on the incorporeality of light and its extension, focusing especially on the Iberian and Italian contexts. The aim of the essay is to show that, while late Aristotelianism unitedly rejected light’s corporeity, many differences arose regarding the way in which this incorporeality should be understood. Relevant perspectives in all of their discussions were Scotus’ teaching of the intentional nature of light, and the Neoplatonics’ c…Read more
Simone Guidi
Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche
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Consiglio Nazionale Delle RicercheResearcher