Silvia Benso

Gathering the contributions of eleven contemporary Italian women thinkers who share a philosophical practice, Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers embraces a general interrelationality, fluidity, and overlapping of concepts for a border-crossing that affects what it means to be subjects that are embodied and participants in the life of their communities, thereby shaping a sense of belonging. Common threads are revealed through the exploration of radically diverse themes (the body, subjectivity, power, freedom, equality, liberation, the emotions, symbolism and metaphors, maternity, reproduction, responsibility, the political, the economic) and approaches (autobiographical styles, personal narratives, rootedness in the everyday, advancement of relationality, empathic responsibility, passions, and commitment to the flourishing of the polis). In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context-a context which has not been and still is not always benign toward women's distinctive originality and creativity.

A practical hermeneutics of time. The Possible Present unfolds from within a freely reinterpreted hermeneutic perspective and provides an original theoretical proposal on the topic of time. In dialogue especially with the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, but resorting also to suggestions coming from a theological background (Barth and Bonhoeffer), the work proposes a personal and original theory of time centered on a conception of the present that does not reduce temporality to a succession of mere instants. When one claims that time is ungraspable, one refers neither to the past (which is rather irretrievable) nor to the future (which is rather uncertain) but to the present. The present in which we are is in fact what fades from our hands without break. The present is a decisive threshold for finite existence. It is the threshold where past and future meet and can give birth to a livable horizon of meaning. Dilating the present and giving it a meaningful chance to be is a task for philosophy. It is the attempt of giving time to time and also giving it shape, place, and space. To succeed at this task while rediscovering the sources of a narrative way of thinking that in truth it has never abandoned, philosophy must go back and turn time into the primary object of discourse, like in stories, which are precisely the attempt at disposing the temporal flow of events according to a meaning. Perone argues that in time, however, what passes is not simply decline, but rather something irreducible, an exteriority that must be said.

Two waves mark the appropriation of Derrida in English: an earlier, literary and a later, philosophical reception. Both readings neglect the relation between deconstruction and ethics, leaving unanswered the question: "why bother with deconstruction?". Critchley's book, written in an elegant, concise, clear and yet--despite its scholarly rigor--pleasant style, admittedly locates itself at the origin of a third way of reception, "one in which ethical--not to mention political--questions are uppermost".

Discusses the impact of the Holocaust on modern philosophy as a rupture. Analyzes the contribution of Christianity to antisemitism, as well as philosophical trends prior to the Holocaust, showing how the Jew was perceived as the incarnation of all that was negative and different, whose elimination became the only way the Western world could acquire an identity. also discusses Jewish theology after Auschwitz, and the question of God's presence and man's faith in the face of such tremendous tragedy.

Traditional ethics has ignored the metaphysics of things, reduced the relation to things to a relation to objects in opposition to subjects, and consequently legitimized the subject's domination over the objects. My dissertation provides a metaphysical and ethical foundation for reappraising the value of things by both challenging and retrieving different aspects of Levinas's and Heidegger's philosophies. ;Levinas considers the Other as the authority capable of suspending the subject's tendency to unlimited power and domination, mistakenly understood as freedom. Ethics is the place of the suspension of violence and of the encounter with the Other. Yet, the Other is only the other person. As in traditional ethics, things remain instrumental to the relation between the I and the Other. ;Heidegger's notion of thinghood, retraced through a tortuous path of thinking leading from the early works to the later essays, is not ethically colored. Nevertheless, it preserves the Otherness of things thanks to their simultaneous mirroring of the mortals, the gods, the sky, and the earth. ;My dissertation extends Levinas's notion of ethics to Heidegger's notion of things and develops an ethics where tenderness is the essential category. Tenderness is a peculiar mode of touch. It allows us contact with things, but is not subject to the abuses of technological manipulation and as a consequence is respectful of the irreducible Otherness of things

By exploring various semantic possibilities contained in the expression “lost in translation”, this essay addresses various difficulties entailed in the work of translation in general and as they apply to the translation into English of the works of Luigi Pareyson specifically. The essay also surveys the status of the Pareyson scholarship in the Anglophone world and suggests possible ways to foster a more congenial milieu for the appreciation of this important Italian philosopher whose thought is rarely recognized by Anglophone thinkers, even of the continental kind.