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 In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context-a context which has not been and still is not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.

Essays address the major themes of Pareyson’s hermeneutic philosophy in the context of his existentialist approach to personhood. What if the inexhaustible were the only mode of self-revelation of truth? The question of the inexhaustibility of truth, and its relation to being and interpretation, is the challenge posed by the philosophy of the prominent Italian thinker Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991). Art, the interpretation of truth, and the theory of being as the ontology of both inexhaustibility and freedom constitute the main themes of Pareyson’s distinctive form of philosophical hermeneutics, which develops also on the basis of another fundamental concept, that of personhood understood in the radically existentialist sense of the human being. In Thinking the Inexhaustible, Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder bring together essays devoted to Pareyson’s hermeneutic philosophy by important international scholars, including well-known Italian thinkers Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo, who were both students of Pareyson. Pareyson’s philosophy of inexhaustibility unfolds in conversation with major figures in Western intellectual history—from Croce to Valéry, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev; from Kant to Fichte, Hegel, and German romanticism; and from Pascal to Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Jaspers, and Heidegger. “This book introduces, in a way that has not been done before, the central ideas from Pareyson’s long philosophical career. It opens up pathways for further critical analysis and fills in a neglected history within the broader scope of continental philosophy.” — James Risser, editor of Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s.

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".

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.

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy

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.

Moving from Heidegger’s suggestion that philosophy has fallen into the Thaletian well because of its inadequate theorization of the essence of things, I retrace in Heidegger’s description of things as gathering elements that enable a discourse on things in terms of their alterity,· I explore the richness of such an alterity in its differing from Levinas’s otherness of the other person; I suggest the formulation of an ethics of things which, through a reciprocal exposure of Heidegger and Levinas, might rescue philosophy from its fall into the Thaletian well.Suite à la thèse de Heidegger selon laquelle la philosophie, depuis qu’elle théorise I’essence des choses, aurait chuté dans le puits de Thalès, j’identifie, à partir de la description heideggérienne de la chose comme rassemblement, les elements qui rendent possible un discours sur les choses en tant qu’altérité. J’explore la richesse d’une telle altérité en ce qu’elle diffire de I’altérité lévinassienne de I’autre personne. Je propose la formulation d’une ethique des choses qui, par I’éclaircissement réciproque de Heidegger et de Lévinas, pourrait prévenir la chute de la philosophie dans le puits de Thalès.

Inverting the sequence of the traditional terms, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas redefines philosophy as the “wisdom of love”. Through an intertwining of Platonic motifs and Levinasian inspirations, the essay argues for a mutually regulated interplay of mythos and logos as a way to regain a sense of wisdom that remains respectful of the elements of otherness in reality-in particular, respectful of the otherness of the Third who, for Levinas, constitutes the ground for politics. That is, the interplay of mythos and logos results into a mytho-logy in which the logos directing the mythos is the voice of the other which imposes not only the preservation, but also the institutionalization of the differences, alterities and incommensurabilities that constitute reality. The consequence of this differently negotiated notion of wisdom is a reconfiguration of philosophy in terms of a mythological politics of bodily, economic testimony in the service of the Third.

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.

The current and the next issues of “Spazio Filosofico”, both devoted to Festival (Festival I and II respectively), are dedicated to Ugo Perone on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Perone’s friends and colleagues have chosen to celebrate his birthday in a philosophical way, namely, with a reflection on the concept of festival/holiday [festa] and its meaning for us today. Thrifty spirits might object that a journal issue is like a gift – one is enough. Are these not times of economic crisis? There is no real festival, however, without a Zugabe: without an addition, an encore, or a supplement. Hence, two issues, both devoted to a single concept. The choice of the theme has not been accidental – the concept of “festival/holiday” plays in fact an important role in Perone’s thought. In an essay that is often quoted in various contributions to the two issues, Perone understands the pair of concepts “ultimate/penultimate,” which has been discussed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in terms of “holidays/everydayness.” For Bonhoeffer, God is present not where human abilities fail but rather “at the center of the village.” Likewise, for Perone, the square, which is the “symbol for the holiday time,” is the center of town. It is even, “at the same time, the center of town and its interruption.”