Andrea Tagliapietra

By questioning the history of the idea of ​​experience from Thales to contemporary philosophy, as is done in this book, it is possible to come across a singular discovery, namely the connection between experience and attention. Neuroscientists, however, warn us that the threshold of human attention – a handful of seconds – has fallen, in recent years, dangerously below that of a goldfish. Today, intelligence, from university entrance tests to the speed we ask of our computers, to television quizzes and the decisions of managers and politicians, is measured by the speed of the response, while those who hesitate look stupid, “retarded,” someone who should be discarded and is not up to the task. Yet without hesitation there is no attention and, therefore, not even that experience that allows us to inhabit the world and, in perspective, also to finally be able to take care of it.

The world of concepts that compose the philosophical vocabulary often presents itself as the crystallization of a previous metaphorical background. This is undoubtedly the specific case of at least two of the terms that Western culture has employed to define the very activity of thinking. Reflection and speculation are the labels of thought within which, especially since the modern era, an ancient "dormant metaphor" has lurked: the mirror metaphor that the decline of the Renaissance and pre-classical organization of knowledge handed over to the complex strategies of the subject. The most significant development in the history of the terms reflection and speculation occurred between the 18th and 19th centuries in the context of classical German philosophy. In the tension between Spekulation and Reflexion, what emerges is precisely the scenario outlined by the mirror metaphor, to which the history of these two terms describing the activity of thinking returns, almost as if to reinvigorate the stasis of concepts. Hegel and Schelling, in the context of their collaboration on the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie project, replaced the term "Spekulation" with "Reflexion" to define philosophy, or, more precisely, that activity of thought that relates to the figure of splitting and the operation of mere intellect (Verstand). Thus, it becomes clear that the terminological rotation takes on a completely negative undertone. It should be noted that the sidelining of speculation, which the Jena terminological rotation leads to, paves the way for its subsequent recovery, which coincides, in the genesis of Hegelian thought, through the various reworkings of the Jena period regarding the logical problem, with the overcoming of the negative conclusions of the Fragment of the System. This newfound popularity of the term should not make us forget the metaphorical context that supports it, where the mirror no longer refers to the separation of catoptric planes—the isolated otherness of mere reflection—but rather to the interplay of reciprocity that mirroring similarly enables.

The article starts from the Lisbon earthquake as a paradigm of the mo­dern meaning of catastrophe and it analyzes the philosophical writings on the Portuguese disaster by Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. The earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon, and several thousand of its inhabitants, shook the Age of enlightenment and affected the best minds in Europe. Sin­ce then, modern conceptions of evil were developed in the attempt to stop bla­ming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own, as testifies the meditation on the ruins of Volney . Hegel, in his lessons on the philosophy of history, will develop the thought on the con­sequences of the catastrophe in dialectic key: the advancement of his­to­ry consists in building from the ruins

Alphabet of Properties is configured as a minimal dictionary of words that recur in contemporary philosophy. The choice obeys a single criterion: to propose those words that in the present continue to characterize our questions about existence. They are words that help us - through metaphors and stories - to understand something of the reality that surrounds us. They do so through a very particular procedure: each one highlighting a hidden meaning, almost always unpublished. Each word has its "property", its "truest" meaning. Measuring ourselves with this "property" can help us to open a passage on the underground heritage of the life of language. Crossing this passage means putting in brackets the theories on which we have built our knowledge and returning to the being of the world as it manifests itself, in its appearance.

Contemporary civilization has long been defined as a "civilization of images." Yet the history of the idea of ​​the image is a plural and multifaceted one, one that has seen the concurrence of diverse disciplines and the attribution of the most disparate functions to the image: ontological, psychological, cultural, technological. This volume aims to demonstrate the many, highly diverse, ways in which the image can be expressed, recovering, alongside salient moments of philosophical reflection, theories and practices that have remained on the margins of our tradition. Conceiving the iconic instance as a vector of unexpressed potential, rather than as a degraded copy of reality, is indeed a fundamental issue for the present time, characterized by a proliferation of media spectacle that demands only to be passively contemplated. This allows us not only to recognize the image's critical and transformative potential, but also to understand the reasons for its long and fascinating history.

This essay wants to analyze the different meanings in which the relationship between "end" and "time" could be interpreted in Kantian philosophy. In the phenomenic context, the end appoints a switch from a temporal series to another one, which, remaining within the continuous horizon of the time, implies a relative end in the context of a continuous un-ended succession. This concept of end in the time, that we can call phenomenic, entails the idea of an endless lenght of time which develops itself towards the future. The perspective of a future infinity opens the idea of a noumenic end, an end of the time since end of the experience horizon. This noumenic end, related to the sinthetic unit of the experience, is the idea of an absolute end which marks out a total discontinuity with everything preceding. Therefore not an endless duration in temporal terms, but a measureless duration, that is a paradoxal notion. So, given that the aporia of the discontinuity between time and eternity remains for the theoretical reason, the bridge which tries to overtake this abyss cannot be run through according to the point of view of the critical reason. Therefore, after the checkmate of the noumenic end, Kant seizes the archimedic point where the thought of the end turns to the thought of the aim: this way the idea of the end acquires a sense only if connected with the idea of an ultimate aim. Proposing himself as the creation ultimate aim, the man finds in the culture the only way in which he could have been able to emancipates himself from nature: the man as moral being is the noumenic man who exerts liberty oversensitive faculty. Nevertheless, it seems that idea of human race progress fights, owing to its intrinsic coherence with a concept of open and endless temporality, against the moral idea of a final aim, which entails the idea of perfection and completion. Here it is that the poetic notion of an end of all things as an end of the time, that is as a sense narrative close, seems to help these requirements. Infact, according to Kant, is possible, through the imaginative action, to replace the cognitive abyss of the time and eternity border instant with a symbolic space of continuity and accomplished duration, that is included in the limits where the human being is no more subject to time but producer and builder of it.

The article explores the ‘philosophy of the individual’ of Lionel Trilling. Focusing on his essays on Jane Austen and William Wordsworth, and on his 1972 book Sincerity and Authenticity, the author goes deep in dialectic which, in Trilling's opinion, lays at the ground of both modern literature and modern individual. On the one hand extremely aware of the theatrical essence of life in society, modern individual is on the other hand ashamed of it and lives his spiritual life in search of his ‘own self’. Modern individual lives following the two cognate ideals of sincerity and authenticity. But, Trilling holds a dialectic vision of this two concepts as well: the only way to live an authentic life which is not a parody of itself is to live, as Wordsworth and Austen have sometimes fancied, ‘beyond style’.

This article explores the structural role of the reflection on the aesthetics of Ancient Egypt, as well as of Egypt-related metaphors and similes, within the work of Mario Perniola. The author argues that Perniola’s conception of Egypt stands as an open alternative to the traditional Platonic, Christian and Hegelian way of dealing with it as a kind of pre-history of Western civilization. On the contrary, Egyptian art is considered by Perniola as the starting point of a permanent current within Western aesthetics, therefore as an aspect of the aesthetics of contemporary art itself and society. The article thus analyses Perniola’s characterization of an array of contemporary aesthetic phenomena through the lenses of their “Egyptian” dimension and philosophical meaning of the enigma.