Enrico Pasini

The paper discusses problems related to historical change in the field of technology applied to the preservation and communication of knowledge. Debates of the years 1990s about the possible decadence of (printed) books in favour of other technologies, are evaluated with the help of a historical analogy. The art of memory was a widespread non-material technique for managing information in a world of prevalent oral communication, which was set aside by the new technologies of printed communication. In the first part, the Author discusses the final phase in the history of the art of memory, sketching Lambert Schenckel’s biography as a good example of utmost individual success in the teaching of the art. Schenckel’s time sees the maximum demand for teaching in the art of memory; nevertheless those are the years when the printed book has already completely won its battle. The second part regards the possibility of a survival of the book as a technological model (i.e. as a model to build applications in new technologies for knowledge communication), notwithstanding the technologies involved in its production, just as the art of memory has been recently used as a model for constructing hypermedia, and just as the book itself survived technological revolutions in past ages. The issue is discussed carefully avoiding to engage in prophecy

The paper deals with the connection of "mathesis", intuition and imagination in Descartes' "Regulae ad directionem ingenii" - young Descartes' first writing about methodology, intended to set the foundation of a "mathesis generalis" - and in some of his followers/critics, in particular Leibniz, on the background of the so-called psychology of faculties. Two are the main points at stake: the presence of mental images in thought processes, and the cognitive functions of the imagination. A thorough analysis of Descartes' examples of intuitive, not-imaginative cognition shows the difficulties in his approach. Different solutions will be proposed by Descartes himself and by most cartesians, on one hand, and by Tschirnhaus on the other hand. Leibniz's peculiar solution is finally considered.

The paper (of which an ample Spanish reworking has appeared in 2012, see <http://philpapers.org/rec/PASLTL>) tries to evaluate Leibniz’s enduring fascination with Spinoza and presents an overview in five stages of the development of his complex relationship to his thought, beginning with the time of Mainz, when Leibniz shows a strange urgency to get in epistolary contact with the author of the Theologico-Political Treatise, despite his public rejection of both the work and the author; then Leibniz’s stay in Paris, especially in the year 1675, when he seeks information through Tschirnhaus on Spinoza’s clandestine doctrines; their personal meeting in the Hague, towards the end of the year 1676, and the subsequent distancing of Leibniz from Spinozism; the reading by Leibniz of Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma and the extension of his arguments against Spinozism to discredit Cartesian philosophy in general, and, finally, Leibniz’s retrospective evaluation of Spinoza’s thought in the Theodicy.

To avoid the mystical rapture that seizes interpreters put before the theme of unitas oppositorum in Cusanus and Leibniz, this contribution shall move from the prosaic question: what does ensue from such opposites or from their conjunction? 2) interweave the analysis with some external point of view, notably that of Erasmus. This question will be investigated on the background of two antitethical traditions in dealing philosophically with opposition and contradiction, although in the end we shall try and find out other ways and reasons for connecting the two thinkers on the ground of the various possible unitates oppositorum, than those of the metaphysical doctrine of the opposites