Luca Bertolino

Philosophical counseling has faced the problem of therapy in different ways. At the beginning, it adopted a wholly negative stance against psychotherapy; later it developed a more critical and articulate awareness. More specifically, and more productively, in recent years philosophical practitioners have tried to answer the question whether their counseling may have a therapeutic function. This article aims to outline some significant attitudes of philosophical practitioners toward the therapeutic issue. By way of conclusion, it offers some personal reflections on philosophy as therapy.

The paper aims to present the proprium dialogicum of the café philo. In theoretical terms, the philosophical dialogue in the café philo can be recognized as discursive rationality and play of the faculties ruled by the logistikon, as an exercise of critical thinking, as an endless quest of meaning, and finally as a way of life. All those theoretical acquisitions are tested by the comparison with results from one year of praxis of café philo, part of the Diderot Project supported by the Fondazione CRT of Torino, conducted with more than 2.000 high-school students of Piedmont.

Il concetto di nulla viene assunto come chiave ermeneutica per accostare la proposta teoretica di uno dei maggiori rappresentanti del pensiero ebraico contemporaneo: Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). Attraverso l'analisi dei luoghi, delle accezioni e delle valenze con cui il nulla si presenta nelle pagine della "Stella della redenzione", si evidenzia come ai diversi significati attribuiti da Rosenzweig a questo concetto corrispondano differenti modi di intendere la filosofia. I temi della filosofia del nulla, della creatio ex nihilo e della morte intesa come nulla esistenziale scandiscono la lettura dell'opus maius di Rosenzweig e mostrano come egli, nel teorizzare un "nuovo pensiero" che vuole rendere conto dell'esperienza religiosa attraverso categorie alternative a quelle onnicomprensive della tradizione filosofica, rimanga per certi versi ancora legato all'idealismo critico.

The philosophical question "what is?" plays different roles in the work of Cohen and Rosenzweig. According to Cohen, it expresses the authentic meaning of the Socratic concept, which has its methodical-transcendental foundation in the Platonic Idea as answer, since it gives an account of the concept. So Cohen turns the question into an epistemological problem, because it ultimately refers to the necessary condition of knowledge. In contrast, Rosenzweig sees in the "what is?" question grounds to condemn the "old" philosophy founded on the identity of being and thought. In his view, the question is the original sin of the "philosophy of the All", which has always reduced everything to something completely different by means of the altering word "is" in the "is"-question. Nevertheless, with regard to the "what is?" question, it is possible to detect a kind of agreement between the two philosophers: namely, Rosenzweig opposes a claim of ontological reduction that Cohen also rejects.