• L’articolo mostra che la teoria hegeliana del riconoscimento è alternativa rispetto alla concezione tradizionale dell’autocoscienza e alle teorie del punto di vista soggettivo. Dopo un confronto con le obiezioni sollevate da D. Henrich e M. Frank contro la teoria del riconoscimento, si mostra come il punto di vista espresso da Hegel potrebbe essere ricostruito all’interno della costellazione contemporanea. Nell’ultima sezione si sostiene che la nozione di “familiarità con sé”, utilizzata da Henr…Read more
  •  61
    Argumentation theory underwent a significant development in the Fifties and Sixties: its revival is usually connected to Perelman's criticism of formal logic and the development of informal logic. Interestingly enough it was during this period that Artificial Intelligence was developed, which defended the following thesis (from now on referred to as the AI-thesis): human reasoning can be emulated by machines. The paper suggests a reconstruction of the opposition between formal and informal logic…Read more
  •  70
    Reconstruction and Pragmatist Metaphysics. On Brandom’s Understanding of Rationality
    Verifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 41 (1-3): 175-201. 2012.
    In this paper I illustrate what is reconstructive rationality, a notion that remains rather undetermined in Robert Brandom's work. I argue that theoretical and historical thinking are instances of reconstruction and should not be identified with it. I then explore a further instance of rational reconstruction, which Brandom calls “reconstructive metaphysics”, arguing that the demarcation between metaphysical and non-metaphysical theories has to be understood as a pragmatic one. Finally, I argue…Read more
  •  94
    Social Space and the Ontology of Recognition
    In Heikki Ikaheimo & Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology, Brill. 2011.
    In this paper recognition is taken to be a question of social ontology, regarding the very constitution of the social space of interaction. I concentrate on the question of whether certain aspects of the theory of recognition can be translated into the terms of a socio-ontological paradigm: to do so, I make reference to some conceptual tools derived from John Searle's social ontology and Robert Brandom's normative pragmatics. My strategy consists in showing that recognitive phenomena cannot be i…Read more
  •  44
    In this paper I analyze recognition as a kind of power. I analyze the notion of power in the general sense as some sort of causal capacity, and introduce the distinction between the active power of doing something and the passive power of undergoing something. Such a distinction is needed in order to capture some central features of the phenomenon of recognition, and in particular the way that ‘being recognized’ and ‘recognizing’ are intertwined. I then argue in favor of both the conceptual and …Read more
  •  90
    The Respect Fallacy: Limits of Respect in Public Dialogue
    In Christian Kock & Lisa Villadsen (ed.), Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, Pennsylvania State University Press. 2012.
    Deliberative politics should start from an adequate and differentiated image of our dialogical practices and their normative structures; the ideals that we eventually propose for deliberative politics should be tested against this background. In this article I will argue that equal respect, understood as respect a priori conferred on persons, is not and should not be counted as a constitutive normative ground of public discourse. Furthermore, requiring such respect, even if it might facilitate d…Read more
  •  73
    Scepsis and Scepticism
    In De Laurentis Allegra & Edwards Jeffrey (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Bloomsbury/Continuum (2012), Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 273-278. 2012.
    Hegel's philosophy aims at responding to the questions raised by modern scepticism concerning the accessibility of the external world, of other minds, and of one's own mind. A key-role in Hegel's argumentative strategy against modern scepticism is played here by Hegel's theory of recognition. Recognition mediates the constitution of individual self-consciousness and intersubjectivity: self-knowledge is not logically independent of the awareness of other minds. At the same time, recognition insti…Read more
  • L’uguaglianza Opaca
    la Società Degli Individui 24 155-162. 2005.
  •  130
    The paper proposes a reconstruction of some fragments of Hegel’s Jena manuscripts concerning the natural genesis of recognitive spiritual consciousness. On this basis it will be argued that recognition has a foothold in nature. As a consequence, recognition should not be understood as a bootstrapping process, that is, as a self-positing and self-justifying normative social phenomenon, intelligible within itself and independently of anything external to it.
  •  5
    Discussione su "Il dolore dell'indeterminato" di Axel Honneth
    with Sergio Dellavalle and Robert Pippin
    Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 16 (3): 609-624. 2003.
  •  6
  •  5
    Brandom's Reconstructive Rationality. Some Pragmatist Themes
    Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. Workshop on Bob Brandom's Recent Philosophy of Language. 2009.
    Abstract. Focusing on part one of Tales of the Mighty Dead and on its relation to the afterword to Between Saying and Doing, I illustrate what reconstructive methodology is and argue that theoretical thinking is one of its instances. I then show that the historical understanding involved in telling the story of a philosophical tradition is another case of reconstruction: one that deepens our understanding of the retrospective character of reconstruction itself, adding something new to our…Read more
  • Ragione ed espressione
    la Società Degli Individui 21 145-146. 2004.
  •  1875
    Introductory essay to the collection "I that is We, We that is I" (ed. by Italo Testa and Luigi Ruggiu, Brill Books, 2016). In this book an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question …Read more
  • La genèse naturelle de la conscience et la reconnaissance
    In Buée Jean-Michel & Renault Emmanuel (eds.), Hegel à Iéna, Ens Éditions. pp. 143-156. 2015.
    Je vais reconstruire quelques aspects de la genèse naturelle de la conscience dans les écrits hégéliens d’Iéna, avec le but de montrer que cette reconstruction est essentielle pour comprendre la genèse des capacités fondamentales qui sont présupposées par l’interaction de la reconnaissance. En particulier, je vais défendre la thèse suivante: Hegel a jeté une base pour une Naturphilosophie de la reconnaissance, en esquissant une sorte d'histoire naturelle de l’évolution de la relation consciente …Read more
  •  83
    The meaning of Enlightenment for the young Hegel (1785-1800) is closely related to the historical and theoretical moment in which skepticism became a constitutive aspect of his dialectical conception of philosophy. In this light the paper shows that the problem of skepticism understood as self-reflection of epistemological and social critique is deeply linked in the young Hegel’s writings with the archeology of the very idea of the dialectics of enlightenment.
  •  24
    TABLE OF CONTENTS I. La rinascita novecentesca 1. Chaïm Perelman: la nuova retorica 2. Stephen Toulmin: la pratica logica e l’uso degli argomenti 3. Ragionamento e linguaggio: la logica naturale di Jean-Blaise Grize II. La logica informale 1. Informale vs. formale? 2. Il concetto di argomento 3. La ripresa della teoria di Paul Grice 4. La ricostruzione degli argomenti 5. La valutazione degli argomenti: le fallacie 6. Il network problem III. Dialogo e dialettica 1. La logica dialogica di Paul Lor…Read more
  •  609
    In this article I argue that contemporary critical theory needs the conceptual tools of social ontology in order to make its own ontological commitments explicit and strengthen its interdisciplinary approach. On the other hand, contemporary analytic social ontology needs critical theory in order to be able to focus on the role that social change, power, and historicity play in the constitution of social facts, and to see the shortcomings of an agential and intentionalist approach to social facts…Read more
  •  218
    Paper given at the 20th Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America, University of South Carolina, October 24-26, 2008 The local problem of the soul-body relation can be grasped only against the global background of the relation between Nature and Spirit. This relates to Hegel's naturalism: the idea that there is one single reality - living reality - and different levels of description of it. This implies, moreover, that it is possible to ascribe some form of naturality also to the social…Read more
  • Anatomia dell’io Un dialogo su lirica e soggettività
    with Durs Grünbein
    la Società Degli Individui 25 99-124. 2006.
  •  142
    Second Nature and Recognition: Hegel and the Social Space
    Critical Horizons 10 (3): 341-370. 2009.
    In this article I intend to show the strict relation between the notions of “second nature” and “recognition”. To do so I begin with a problem (circularity) proper to the theory of Hegelian and post- Hegelian Anerkennung. The solution strategy I propose is signifi cant also in terms of bringing into focus the problems connected with a notion of “space of reasons” that stems from the Hegelian concept of “Spirit”. I thus broach the notion of “second nature” as a bridgeconcept that can play a key r…Read more
  • In Horae canonicae W. H. Auden ha messo a tema la dimensione mi­metica della condizione umana. Il saggio ricostruisce in tal senso l’an­tropologia negativa di Auden, prendendo le mosse dall’analisi del desi­de­rio di riconoscimento quale elemento centrale dell’identità storica. Attra­ver­so una lettura dei motivi della folla e del doppio, e sullo sfondo del poe­ma The Age of Anxiety e della produzione saggistica di Auden, si mo­stra che la «routine della lode e del biasimo» innesca meccanismi im…Read more
  •  57
    In this paper, making reference to Robert Brandom's philosophical proposal - and against the background of Brandom's debate with Jürgen Habermas - I shall endeavor, first, to define the relation between recognition and normativity and then between recognition and criticism; in the final part of the paper I shall suggest a perspective that approaches recognition in terms of capacities. On this basis I attempt to see the critical attitude as something that is founded more on individual potentials …Read more