Ludovica Boi

This volume is devoted to one of the central concepts in Giacomo Leopardi’s theoretical and poetic universe: imagination. To investigate imagination is, in fact, to examine its relationship with philosophy and poetry, love, memory, imitation, and the inner life, as well as with vision and pictorial representation, and with the practical capacity to act morally and politically. The essays collected here, edited by Ludovica Boi and Sebastian Schwibach, focus not only on Leopardi’s texts, with the aim of contributing to a more precise and historically grounded understanding of his thought, but also on interpreters who have so far received little scholarly attention — Paolo Marzolo, Giovanni Vailati, and Aldo Capitini — or who are examined here from new perspectives, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Giuseppe Rensi, Giovanni Gentile, Piero Bigongiari, Toni Negri, and Emanuele Severino. In this way, the volume enriches the history of philosophical interpretations of Leopardi.

This issue of "Filosofia italiana", edited by Ludovica Boi and Emilio Carlo Corriero, explores the diverse forms assumed by tragic thought in twentieth-century Italian philosophy. Rather than treating the tragic as a mere expression of pessimism, the contributions examine it as a mode of questioning existence, history, freedom, evil, nihilism, and the limits of reason. The volume discusses Adriano Tilgher, Andrea Emo, Carlo Diano, Alberto Caracciolo, Gianni Carchia, Giuseppe Rensi, Luigi Pareyson, and Ferruccio Masini, while also considering Carchia’s interpretations of Hölderlin and Schelling. Across these perspectives, tragedy emerges as both an experience of rupture and a source of philosophical insight: a way of confronting the irreducible conflict at the heart of life without seeking premature reconciliation. The issue thus reconstructs an alternative genealogy of twentieth-century Italian thought.

Filosofia italiana 19 (2024) This issue of "Filosofia italiana", edited by Ludovica Boi and Emilio Carlo Corriero, explores the diverse forms assumed by tragic thought in twentieth-century Italian philosophy. Rather than treating the tragic as a mere expression of pessimism, the contributions examine it as a mode of questioning existence, history, freedom, evil, nihilism, and the limits of reason. The volume discusses Adriano Tilgher, Andrea Emo, Carlo Diano, Alberto Caracciolo, Gianni Carchia, Giuseppe Rensi, Luigi Pareyson, and Ferruccio Masini, while also considering Carchia’s interpretations of Hölderlin and Schelling. Across these perspectives, tragedy emerges as both an experience of rupture and a source of philosophical insight: a way of confronting the irreducible conflict at the heart of life without seeking premature reconciliation. The issue thus reconstructs an alternative genealogy of twentieth-century Italian thought.

Cultura tedesca 70 (2025) This issue of "Cultura tedesca" is devoted to the philosophical, theatrical, and cultural significance of Botho Strauß’s work. It investigates the tensions between language and silence, presence and absence, memory and historical rupture, desire and renunciation. Particular attention is given to the relationship between theatrical expression and the crisis of representation, as well as to the role of myth, mysticism, literary tradition, and cultural memory in the construction of contemporary subjectivity. Strauß’s writing emerges as a space in which the limits of communication are not simply lamented but transformed into a source of thought, exposing the fragile foundations of identity, intimacy, and social belonging. The issue also considers the broader implications of his cultural criticism, including its engagement with modernity, political disorientation, and the changing forms of collective life.

This essay explores the stranger as both a gift and a threat, focusing on the unstable relationship between identity and otherness. Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Lévinas, it argues that the self is constituted through an alterity that precedes and unsettles it. The stranger therefore exposes the limits of any closed conception of identity, while hospitality appears as an unsettling form of openness rather than a secure welcome. Particular attention is given to the ambiguity of the Greek term xenos, which designates both guest and enemy, and to the connection between otherness, gift, and responsibility. The essay concludes by proposing an “aneconomic” ethics capable of interrupting the logic of property, exchange, and sacrifice in response to the vulnerable stranger.

This essay investigates the intellectual affinity between Leopardi and Nietzsche through their shared interest in the relationship between poetry and philosophy. It argues that both thinkers assign the imagination a central cognitive role, presenting it as the creative power underlying concepts, language, and every claim to truth. Nietzsche’s early admiration for Leopardi as a philosopher of tragic knowledge gradually gives way to criticism of his pessimism, yet Leopardi’s influence continues to emerge in Nietzsche’s reflections on beauty, illusion, and the life-enhancing function of art. By examining their ideas on poetic knowledge, philosophical creation, and the limits of rational thought, the essay shows how imagination makes it possible to unite truth and illusion, thought and feeling, and knowledge and life.

This essay explores the intellectual dialogue between Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Nietzsche, focusing on the central role of imagination in their thought. It examines Nietzsche’s changing response to Leopardi, from early admiration to later criticism, and traces the persistence of Leopardi’s influence beneath this apparent break. For both thinkers, imagination is not opposed to knowledge but helps produce it, allowing poetry and philosophy to converge. The comparison reveals imagination as a creative and interpretative power, essential to human knowledge and experience. It also highlights its vital function: by giving form and value to reality, imagination makes life — and the pursuit of happiness — possible.

This essay traces the significance of Dionysus throughout Nietzsche’s philosophical development, arguing that the Dionysian remains connected to the intuition of an underlying unity. In Nietzsche’s early writings, this unity takes the form of the metaphysical “primordial One,” revealed through ecstatic experiences that overcome individuality and the boundaries between human beings, nature, and the divine. The essay then examines Nietzsche’s readings of the Presocratics, especially Heraclitus, whose philosophy of becoming offers a model for overcoming the opposition between being and change. In Nietzsche’s mature thought, Dionysus reappears through the doctrines of eternal recurrence and the death of God, which dissolve the distinction between the true and apparent worlds. Dionysian wisdom thus becomes a tragic affirmation of life, embracing both suffering and joy within the unity of a perpetually becoming world.

This essay uncovers Jakob Böhme as a largely neglected source of Giorgio Colli’s early philosophy. It investigates how Böhme’s theosophy helps illuminate the origins of Colli’s notion of “vissutezza”. For Colli, it names an overwhelming experience in which the self, the world, and the divine converge. Such an experience exceeds representation and can never be completely translated into language. Böhme’s writings dramatize this tension as a struggle between vision and expression. The attempt to communicate the inexpressible thus becomes both an ontological and a linguistic conflict. The essay traces significant parallels between Böhme’s Ungrund and Colli’s notion of the thing-in-itself. Both are presented as dynamic, self-revealing principles driven by an inner desire for expression. Their unity is not static or abstract, but unfolds through multiplicity, tension, and differentiation. This perspective reveals a possible alternative to Schopenhauer’s dualism and doctrine of denial. Particular attention is given to Böhme’s concept of Geistleiblichkeit, the inseparability of spirit and body. The essay concludes that Böhme provides a vital mystical foundation for Colli’s vision of a living, expressive cosmos.

This essay brings Giorgio Colli’s and Aldo Masullo’s philosophies into dialogue through the question of pain. Despite their different intellectual backgrounds, both place affective experience at the centre of philosophical reflection. They understand the logos not as neutral or autonomous, but as embodied and emotionally situated. Pain emerges as a limit-experience between individual consciousness and a pre-personal dimension of existence. In Colli, this dimension is called “immediacy”; in Masullo, it is the “Arcisenso” or original sense. The essay compares their accounts of lived experience, consciousness, and the formation of the individual self. It examines pain’s double function as both a testimony to life and a possible interruption of consciousness. Particular attention is devoted to the tension between the need to express pain and its ultimate incommunicability. The analysis also explores the relationship between pain and time, understood as separation, loss, and discontinuity. In both thinkers, artistic expression offers a way of confronting solitude without eliminating it. Poetry and art give form to what cannot be directly communicated, making shared meaning possible. The essay concludes by highlighting the philosophical and therapeutic significance of art as a response to pain.

This essay examines Giorgio Colli’s interpretation of Nietzsche and the Greek world. It focuses on the intellectual debt linking Colli to his philosophical master. Colli adopts Nietzsche’s genealogical method and his global vision of Greek culture. However, he also subjects Nietzsche’s thought to a radical critical revision. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus: for Colli, Apollo is not merely the god of form, order, and artistic appearance; he also embodies a violent and tragic dimension that Nietzsche tends to overlook. The essay then outlines the central principles of Colli’s philosophy of expression. According to Colli, both the world and the logos express an inaccessible immediacy. Reason is therefore not autonomous but emerges from, and ultimately points back to, life. This argument is illustrated through Colli’s interpretation of Eleatic logic and Zeno’s paradoxes. The essay concludes that, in Colli, the tragic dissolution of reason becomes a reflection of divine life.

Giorgio Colli engaged in intense activity, not only in the fields of research and teaching but also in publishing (his most internationally recognized work is the conception and realization of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works). Colli studied archaic Greek thought extensively, arguing for the connection between the mystical and the political in the mystery and Orphic traditions, from which Presocratic speculation originated. Distancing himself from Aristotle's Metaphysics, Colli does not see the Presocratics as the stammering preparers of a future system of nature, but as imposing mystical thinkers, whose thought is in continuity with the Orphic-Eleusinian tradition. By tracing back to the roots of Presocratic "wisdom," he aims to recover its original religious and cultic matrix and background, in which the imposing figures of Dionysus and Apollo predominate.

My paper aims to investigate the conception of culture, and in particular the conception of philology and classical literature, in the young Nietzsche’s thought (1869-1875). Starting from the radical distancing from the method and purpose of the 19th-century classical philology, the questions are: from what kind of cognitive-practical impulse the study of the ancients derives for Nietzsche; what the salient features of the Nietzschean method are; what the proper function of a renewed way of looking at the Greeks is. Some ideas are proposed relating to the affinity of Nietzsche's vision with Leopardi’s (regarding the criticism of the study method of the past widespread in the 19th century; and the distinction between scientific and humanistic studies) and Humboldt’s thought (regarding the project of a “new” Bildung). More generally, the reading that Giorgio Colli gives of the young Nietzsche’s thought is used as a critical reagent of the positions exposed and it is also shown that Colli is one of the main heirs of the Nietzschean method. In the final part of the paper, I focus on the distinction between "human" and "humanistic", theorized by the young Nietzsche: my thesis is that, despite the distancing from the humanism of traditional philology, the Nietzschean thought isn’t free from a humanistic vocation.

In this essay I try to inspect the interpretation of the light-darkness dialectic by Jakob Böhme (1575-1624): it is a fight, which involves every aspect of the theosophist's thought, from psychology to natural philosophy, from morality to gnoseology, from ontology to theology. Starting from the reference to Böhme’s famous vision of sunshine reflected by the dark surface of zinc, I try to characterize the experience of “seeing” as the cornerstone of a sensorial mystic, understood as an attempt to translate what “has been seen” in the inwardness. The analysis of Ungrund’s concept allows me to make explicit the co-essentiality of light and darkness: there is no reality other than the divine reality, which however has a rhythmic nature; and light and darkness are the phases of this rhythm.

The essay focuses on the problem of freedom in Jakob Böhme’s thought (1575-1624), examining some textual places where this problem assumes a great importance. What emerges is the conception of a “freedom without essence” (Freyheit ohne Wesen), proper to the foundation without grounds of reality, whose power resonates in the wheel of essences. The condition of possibility of individual freedom is then problematised, starting from the recognition of the human soul as an infinite divine emanation. Finally, the echo that this conception of freedom has had in two modern German thinkers, Friedrich Schelling and Martin Heidegger, is outlined.

In this essay I reconstruct the conception of ecstatic knowledge developed by Giorgio Colli in the mature phase of his thought, in conjunction with the elaboration of the philosophy of expression. The cornerstone of the argumentation is the theory of an ecstatic reason, which necessarily converges in the ‘immediacy’. I also try to clarify the meaning of Colli’s intention to philosophize ‘after Nietzsche’, recognizing in memory the keystone of the theory of expression, understood as an ecstatic structure.

My paper provides a critical contribution about the contemporary condition of Universities. The starting point is furnished by some twentieth-century readings of the status of European Universities (by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Giorgio Colli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Hadot), in order to thematize the progressive impoverishment of the university structure in the 20th century. Therefore, the paper deals with the changes produced in the University by the pandemic phenomenon, tracing a continuity between the facts described by the mentioned authors and the most recent events.

The essay deals with the issue of immediacy/mediation through the interaction of two original theoretical proposals of the second half of the Italian 20th century, namely those by Giorgio Colli and Gianni Carchia. The first part of the essay exposes the problem of immediacy in Colli’s thought and its connection with wisdom (especially on the basis of "Filosofia dell’espressione", 1969), focusing both on the subsequent decay of logos and on the expressive forms of authentic logos, among which the enigma. The second paragraph presents the interpretation of archaic wisdom proposed by Carchia (starting from "Orfismo e tragedia", 1979), also extending the problem of immediacy/mediation to the field of art and painting (bearing in mind, for example, "Il mito in pittura", 1987 and "Arte e bellezza", 1995). Finally, through the analysis of Carchia’s preface to a Colli’s work, the close relationship between a “philosophy of expression” and the “unexpressed” is examined.

The article deals with the problem of health in Nietzsche’s philosophy. While secondary literature on this topic has been usually confined to his works posterior to 1878, this text especially focusses on an earlier work, i.e., the Untimely Meditations. It is shown how that work is relevant to the topic, for there the author denounces for the first time the inadequacy of general formulas of health. Upon this criticism, he will eventually build his own conception of health and illness. This analysis starts with what Nietzsche called a cultural and historical illness in the early 1870s: an illness that, paradoxically, generated an inadequate notion of ‘health’. Secondly, this investigation deals with the Nietzschean reaction to that generalised illness, dwelling on the concept of health as an individual process, in the form of a connection between the aesthetic and the physiological fields. Finally, this article elucidates the problems within the concept of the innumerable healths of the body, hinting at some contemporary challenges.

This essay addresses the problem of Nietzsche’s debt to the pathological interpretation of tragic catharsis developed by philologist Jacob Bernays, with particular attention to the aesthetic question of the autonomy-heteronomy of art. In "The Birth of Tragedy" Nietzsche criticises Bernays’ interpretation by defending the principles of art’s autonomy, i.e. by stating that it is not possible to understand Greek tragedy if one studies it only in relation to its extra-aesthetic (in Bernays’ case pathological) effects. But is it really possible to conceive of art only as autonomous? The essay shows that even Nietzsche himself identifies tragedy as a healing power, an effective balm for the health of the Greek people. Thus, on the basis of a critical consideration of Nietzsche’s tragic theory, an attempt is made to relativise Nietzsche’s explicit criticism of Bernays’ interpretation and thus reconsider the relationship between the two theories.

The article deals with the connection, within Nietzsche’s thought, between the pursuit of health and artistic-poetic practice. This connection, which has not yet been comprehensively addressed by critics, is affirmed by the author in both his theoretical works and letters. To embody one’s declination of health, each individual is required to engage in an activity that is both creative, both modeling and benefits from perspective. Bearing this in mind, I address the relationship between the figures of the physician and the poet within "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Just as under the mask of the poet hides both the romantic nihilist, who fantasizes about an ideal and frozen world, and the Dionysian jester, who instead discovers the inconsistency of any dichotomy, the experience of illness in Nietzsche presents at least two faces. It can be interpreted as the mere opposite of health, in line with romantic nihilism, or as what, as the poet-physician Zarathustra teaches, offers a renewed opportunity for health.

The problem of ‘tragic’ in Gianni Carchia’s thought has not yet been critically considered by scholars. This paper aims to compensate for this gap. After setting out the salient features of the notion of ‘tragic’ in the author’s thought, the focus is on one of his main sources, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. In particular, the Grund zum Empedokles and the Anmerkungen to Sophocles prove to be decisive texts for the elaboration of Carchia’s concept of ‘aesthetic form’. The final part of the paper is dedicated to the critical discussion of this concept in its relation to knowledge and catharsis.

This article argues that Nietzsche’s thought and life are deeply intertwined with the tradition of melancholia studies, from Aristotle to Starobinski. Rather than merely assembling biographical evidence – drawn primarily from Nietzsche’s correspondence – it demonstrates a substantive philosophical continuity between the problem of melancholia and Nietzsche’s theoretical project. Within this framework, self-knowledge, a defining feature of the reformed melancholic paradigm, emerges as a foundational element of Nietzsche’s philosophy. On this basis, the article offers a new interpretation of The Gay Science § 341, reading it through the lens of vanitas and thereby situating it within the conceptual horizon of the melancholic paradigm.