Stefano Marino

Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents one of the most important texts in modern philosophy. However, while its importance for 19th-century philosophy has been widely acknowledged, scholars have often overlooked its far-reaching influence on 20th-century thought. This book aims to account for the various interpretations of Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment formulated in the last century. The book approaches the subject matter from both a historical and a theoretical point of view and in relation to different cultural contexts, also exploring in an unprecedented way its influence on some very up-to-date philosophical developments and trends. It represents the first choral and comprehensive study on this missing piece in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, capable of cutting in a unique way across different traditions, movements and geographical areas. All main themes of Kant’s aesthetics are investigated in this book, while at the same time showing how they have been interpreted in very different ways in the 20th century. With contributions by Alessandro Bertinetto, Patrice Canivez, Dario Cecchi, Diarmuid Costello, Nicola Emery, Serena Feloj, Günter Figal, Tom Huhn, Hans-Peter Krüger, Thomas W. Leddy, Stefano Marino, Claudio Paolucci, Anne Sauvagnargues, Dennis J. Schmidt, Arno Schubbach, Scott R. Stroud, Thomas Teufel, and Pietro Terzi.

This article is focused on the philosophy of Arnold Gehlen, one of the founders, with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, of the important tradition of German philosophical anthropology in the twentieth century, especially thanks to his masterpiece Der Mensch (1940). After a short introductory section on the struggle of various twentieth century philosophers (mostly in the movements of phenomenology and pragmatism) to redeem embodiment from the oblivion in which Western philosophy and science had put it, and also on the recent contribution offered in this field by the development of enactive philosophies and so-called “4E Cognition” approaches, I offer a reconstruction and an interpretation of some fundamental concepts of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, with a particular focus on the question of embodiment in Der Mensch. Then, adopting a historico-philosophical perspective and a comparative methodology, I try to establish a conceptual comparison and connection between some aspects of Gehlen’s thinking (with a particular focus on his notions of second nature, environment, and world) and certain philosophical questions about human embodiment that have recently emerged in the context of the diverse variants of contemporary enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic, radical, etc.).

In this article, I explore some questions concerning the aesthetics of musical performance. I approach this topic from a perspective influenced by some theoretical works of Bill Bruford, Shaun Gallagher, and Richard Shusterman, and choose the musical practice of drumming as a promising case to exemplify certain concepts and themes. Following various insights inspired, in particular, by Bruford and Gallagher, I argue for a conception of drumming as embodied and mindful performance, in contrast to other influential conceptions (sometimes suggested by philosophers, other times by drummers) that understand musical performance in general, and the art of drumming in particular, as mindless activities; namely, as a sort of selfless ‘flow’ without thought.

If 2019 was an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the untimely death of Theodor W. Adorno in August 1969, also 2020 has been an “Adornian year” because of the 50th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Adorno’s great but unfinished masterpiece Aesthetic Theory, first published in 1970. Adorno’s intellectual legacy is still alive today and indeed important for the conceptual tools as it still provides to develop a critical, active and negative (instead than acritical, passive and affirmative) relationship with the real. In the vast and complex corpus of Adorno’s entire philosophical oeuvre, his aesthetic theory deserves an especially close and renewed attention today for the variety of intellectual provocations that are still richly offered to us in order to critically understand our age.