Marco Sgarbi

This volume takes cue from the idea that the thought of no philosopher can be understood without considering it as the result of a constant, lively dialogue with other thinkers, both in its internal evolution as well as in its reception, re-use, and assumption as a starting point in addressing past and present philosophical problems. In doing so, it focuses on a feature that is crucially emerging in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science, namely the complexity in the production of knowledge. The book explores the applicability of this approach to a long-considered armchair philosopher, namely René Descartes, who is now more and more understood as a full-blown scientist, networker, and intellectual éminence grise rather than as the mere philosopher of the cogito, as well as the originator of different ‘Cartesianisms’ which encompassed many ideas and approaches for long captured by dichotomic historiographical categories as rationalism and empiricism, or speculative and experimental philosophy. The essays gathered in the volume aim to address the ways in which Descartes’s philosophy evolved and was progressively understood by scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from different contexts and eras, either by considering direct interlocutors of Descartes such as Isaac Beeckman and Elisabeth of Bohemia, early modern thinkers who developed upon his ideas and on particular topics as Nicolas Malebranche or Thomas Willis, those who adapted his overall methodology in developing new systems of knowledge as Johannes Clauberg and Pierre-Sylvain Régis, and contemporary thinkers from continental and analytic traditions like Emanuele Severino and Peter Strawson.

This paper focuses on Renaissance and early modern readings of Aristotle’s _Meteorologica_ I 7.344a5-8, showing how the various interpretations of this passage were foundational for the establishment of an epistemology based on hypotheses and conjectures, and how this passage informed major philosophical and scientific elaborations of the time, extending its influence beyond the original field of application. The paper considers authors such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Philoponus, Nifo, Pomponazzi, Wurstisen, Descartes, Galileo, Charleton and Boyle.

Starting from the examination of a passage of the Dialogo sopra i massimi sistemi del mondo that has been largely ignored by the scholarship, in this paper I want to reveal the true nature of Galileo’s epistemology in terms of its epistemic ideal, that is that theory is capable of providing true and certain knowledge about natural phenomena coming from sensation. The investigation examines all the occurrences of the expression sensate esperienze in its singular and plural forms, both in the Latin and in the vernacular. The research proceeds diachronically through an analysis of Galileo’s writings taken in order to show the progressive development of his epistemology. The paper will demonstrate how in thinking about sensate experiences Galileo had in mind as epistemic paradigm that of the epistemology of anatomy.

The concept of »transcendental« is undoubtedly one of the most important terms in Kantian philosophy. For over one hundred and fifty years major Kantian scholars have debated its origin and set out various interpretations. The Kant-Forschung has recently established four different possible sources: 1) Schulmetaphysik 2) Ch. Wolff; 3) A. G. Baumgarten; 4) J. H. Lambert. The aim of this essay is to suggest a different origin and genesis of the Kantian concept of »transcendental« by the methodologies of Quellengeschichte and Begriffsgeschichte, investigating the philosophical and historical background of Königsberg from the beginning of the seventeenth century to Kant and to show reasons for the shift of the concept of »transcendental« from metaphysics to logic. The doctrine of transcendentals was very much alive in Königsberg and already in Scholastic philosophers the »transcendentals« shifted its interest from being to the knowable, from ontology to logic. However, up to 1763, Kant accepts the Wolffian doctrine of transcendentals and the concept of »transcendental« is synonymous to »metaphysical«. In the second half of the Sixties, probably in the wake of the preparatory works to the Beweisgrund, Kant goes deeply into the interpretation of Baumgarten and the »transcendental« becomes synonymous with »essential« in opposition to »metaphysical«. In the wake of Crusius' reflections, instead, »transcendental« becomes »logical« in contrast with »metaphysical«. Beginning in the Seventies, in the preparatory fragments to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, the »transcendental« establishes itself as a synonymous of »logical« and »essential« in opposition to »metaphysical« and »real«, and it concerns the object of knowledge in general without any reference to the experience. From this conception derives the concept of »transcendental« of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft as an examination of the condition of the possibility of an a priori knowledge. In the conclusion I argue that Kant did not deduce the doctrine of transcendentals from his logic, but that both doctrines are developed simultaneously and that Kant always tried to integrate them with each other. Fragments of the second half of the Seventies show a progressive attempt of this integration, which was doomed to fail.

Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the ‘great names’, but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field. ​

A historical and philosophical reassessment of the impact of Aristotle and early-modern Aristotelianism on the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant’s transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, such as the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century.

«Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me». With these famous words written on paper and inscribed in stone, Immanuel Kant concludes the Critique of Practical Reason. In this paper, I intend to show how this sentence is closely linked with: 1) the kantian doctrine on the sublime and 2) to the foundation of the logic of the irrational in the Critique of Judgement.

Im Blick auf die Grenzen und die Möglichkeiten, die die Begriffsgeschichte bisher entwickelt hat, analysiert dieser Band ihre Geschichte, ihre Entwicklung und ihre zukünftigen Perspektiven. Der erste Teil behandelt die historische Entwicklung der Begriffsgeschichte, ihre bedeutendsten Leistungen und ihre Beziehung zur Problemgeschichte und zur Metapherngeschichte. Teil II erörtert die Beziehungen zwischen Begriffsgeschichte und politischer Philosophie und Teil III widmet sich einem Ausblick auf neue Horizonte der begriffsgeschichtlichen Forschung.

Abstract The aim of the paper is to reassess the role of British Aristotelianism within the history of early modern logic between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a crucial moment of cultural transition from the model of humanistic rhetoric and dialectic to that of facultative logic, that is, a logic which concerns the study of the cognitive powers of the mind. The paper shows that there is a special connection between Paduan Aristotelianism and British empiricism, through the mediation of British Aristotelianism. British Aristotelians took the ideas of the Paduan Aristotelian tradition and carried them to an extreme, gradually removing them from the original Aristotelian context in which they were grounded and developing what would later become the fundamental ideas of British empiricism