Vinicio Busacchi

This paper aims to identify some significant traits of contemporary Italian theoretical philosophy, starting from a new definition of theoretical philosophy and following an idea put forward by critical hermeneutics. Critical hermeneutics places particular emphasis, on the one hand, on the centrality of the philosophical work with the sciences and, on the other hand, on the openness towards different schools and traditions, overcoming the radicalised position. It is precisely the knot of radical opposition that emerges among the most important challenges, alongside the challenges of seeking moderate autonomy, upgrading relations with the extra-philosophical world, and distancing from communicative-media and commercial seductions.

In this paper the author considers the problem of the act of reading in Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy. Distinguishing between the methodological level and the speculative level of this problem, it first discusses the method and style of Ricoeur’s philosophising. This can be summarised through the frame of a critical hermeneutics and, subsequently, of the philosophical fulcrum, centred on the hermeneutic–anthropological dimension and on the concept of narrative identity. The main thesis is that the ultimate justification of Ricoeur’s literary choices and his way of approaching texts and the act of reading are justified by his specific vision of the human being. Philosophical hermeneutics can lead to profile and deepen this vision.

Behind the effort to harmonise the dual registers of Freudian discourse, Ricoeur expresses the desire not to give in to a reductionist and naturalising conception of the subject. Thanks to the coordinated work between phenomenology and hermeneutics, he achieved a radical recasting of the reality of the unconscious. He worked around psychoanalysis to develop his philosophy of the human being, but his anthropological conception of maturity was still open to comparison with the various sciences of the mind and brain.

Pedagogy today seems to be increasingly reduced to the bare question of its techniques and the pedagogical task to the objective of the development of concrete skills and competences, in response to the determined needs of the market and society. It is because of the configuration of such a framework that the return to the reading of Antonio Banfi’s reflections on the philosophy of education and pedagogy seems to convey a character of topicality and opportunity. This essay attempts to update Banfi’s conception by placing it in dialectic with hermeneutics and pragmatism according to a theoretical line that on the one hand focuses on the mediative function of critical hermeneutics, and on the other brings the question of the person back to the centre.

The dialogue and discussion between philosophy and education has a long and varied history, both in terms of intra- and interdisciplinary research. This dialogue and discussion has found cause for further strengthening in recent times; and not only for the notable development of innovative technologies and diffusion of “technological culture”. The continuous transformation of society (in its political-cultural orientations, in its new working needs, in its changes in value and sensitivity) influences and pushes educational institutions to innovate and adapt...

Siamo ormai lontani dalla stagione in cui la forza propulsiva della “svolta linguistica” si impose come tendenza dominante nel dibattito filosofico. Da varie angolazioni si è potuto parlare negli ultimi anni di pictorial turn come antidoto all’egemonia del paradigma linguistico in filosofia. Il volume Verità, Immagine, Normatività. Truth, Image, and Normativity non si inserisce direttamente in questa nuova tendenza, ma ruota comunque intorno a questioni che derivano dal medesimo sfondo. I 24 saggi qui raccolti tengono conto dei diversi ruoli che le immagini possono svolgere, a seconda che si focalizzi la loro dimensione descrittiva o normativa, e indagano alcuni aspetti del rapporto tra immagine e linguaggio. Questi problemi di filosofia dell’immagine, intesa sia come immagine cognitiva sia come immagine grafica, costituiscono il fil rouge di questo volume. Una tale riflessione sui linguaggi figurati e sulla comunicazione visiva non-linguistica costringe a riformulare in termini nuovi le grandi domande concernenti le tradizionali nozioni di verità, oggettività, normatività, consenso e persuasione.

Siamo ormai lontani dalla stagione in cui la forza propulsiva della “svolta linguistica” si impose come tendenza dominante nel dibattito filosofico. Da varie angolazioni si è potuto parlare negli ultimi anni di pictorial turn come antidoto all’egemonia del paradigma linguistico in filosofia. Il volume Verità, Immagine, Normatività. Truth, Image, and Normativity non si inserisce direttamente in questa nuova tendenza, ma ruota comunque intorno a questioni che derivano dal medesimo sfondo. I 24 saggi qui raccolti tengono conto dei diversi ruoli che le immagini possono svolgere, a seconda che si focalizzi la loro dimensione descrittiva o normativa, e indagano alcuni aspetti del rapporto tra immagine e linguaggio. Questi problemi di filosofia dell’immagine, intesa sia come immagine cognitiva sia come immagine grafica, costituiscono il fil rouge di questo volume. Una tale riflessione sui linguaggi figurati e sulla comunicazione visiva non-linguistica costringe a riformulare in termini nuovi le grandi domande concernenti le tradizionali nozioni di verità, oggettività, normatività, consenso e persuasione.

This paper aims to explore some aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of perception (1945), proceeding from the chapter on attention – introductory section – to evaluate its redefining outcome, and to place it in dialectic with Paul Ricoeur’s research on Freedom and Nature (1950) – first section, chap. III. The hypothesis is that this work can help to shed new light both on a possible understanding of attention in the phenomenological perspective and that it can contribute to determine better the relationship between attention and the dimension of the involuntary. In the background, this opens up the dilemma about the possibility that a phenomenological approach to the unconscious could be a better explanation than a naturalising approach.

There is no doubt that, for better or for worse, popular mobilisation always revels a significant, or even highly significant, transformative power. It can express itself as a sublime and magmatic power that, as historia docet, does not necessarily bring chaos and destruction, even when it shakes the institutions to their foundations. It generates and nurtures the crisis; and, as French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur remarks, ‘la crise de la démocratie est une crise double où se conjuguent un mouvement ascendant et un mouvement descendant, des menaces fécondes et des menaces ruineuses’. In short, the crisis generates and nurtures new energies and ideas, a fusion of horizons, refoundation and new impulses, which all pervade, however, a time of uncertainties where that fecundity of crisis and that possibility of ruin and fall inhabit half walls. After all, as a possibility, popular mobilisation is in itself a cornerstone of democratic life. Ricœur again underlines that ‘La démocratie est une idée en devenir et en combat. C’est une histoire commencée que nous avons la tâche de continuer. La crise (...) est un moment dans une histoire dont il faut retrouver l’élan’. It is the People who are primarily responsible for what happens in a democratic state.

Nel dibattito teorico, la metafora della mappa è stata spesso usata per esplorare il ruolo della nozione di verità nel rapporto tra linguaggio, rappresentazioni, realtà. Le mappe sono sempre prospettiche, legate a interessi (cognitivi e non cognitivi) di chi le elabora; come ha osservato Michael Lynch, "il mondo non si mappa da sé". Per quanto diverse esse siano, assumiamo in genere che le pratiche descrittive possano aspirare a qualche forma di verità e corrispondere al modo in cui le cose stanno. Non è facile spiegare in che cosa consista questa "corrispondenza", anche perché è controversa la possibilità di distinguere quanto, nelle rappresentazioni linguistiche, dipende dal mondo e quanto dai nostri schemi concettuali. Il ruolo del concetto di verità diventa sempre più complesso, se si prendono sul serio le differenze nei modi di accedervi e nei campi oggettivi di riferimento; ciò dà spazio ad uno spettro molto ampio di posizioni filosofiche, fra loro contrastanti, che rimescolano le carte delle tradizionali controversie tra realisti, antirealisti, relativisti. I saggi compresi in questo volume costituiscono un momento di incontro volto ad afferrare e discutere la fisionomia di queste controversie.

Emilio Betti was not only one of the greatest Romanists and jurists of the contemporary era, but he was also a historian and philosopher. As a legal scholar, his writings on the great themes of legal history and on the philosophers who have dealt with them certainly deserve reconsideration and critical evaluation. In addition, Betti’s analysis of the role of jurists and their prudential deserves attention. These include analyses and reflections on the different eras of Roman history, both during the Republic and in subsequent eras, which are still of absolute relevance today. In particular, it is the debate on pandectics and the importance of the critique of European pandectics that marks an epochal shift in the study of law. Betti was an eminent scholar of law, who studied it in all its forms, always studying law from a historical and dynamic perspective, and had been a teacher not only of Roman law, but of various legal disciplines, and above all of subjects that had the current law as its object, in particular contemporary law....

This paper aims to show how Paul Ricoeur’s inquiry on memory, trace, and testimony contributes to rebalancing a framework that, at the dialectical level between imagination and representation, would essentially present historians’ work as hermeneutical. In Ricoeur’s later writings, we find a differently balanced perspective by focusing the (neurobiological and psychological) substrate of representation behind trace and memory. Representation precedes interpretation. And neither memory’s fidelity nor history’s epistemic truth belong to a game that would be solely played within the communicative space of a plurality of cognitive agents who are exchanging, controlling and sharing their experiences. Consequently, the reality of the past itself emerges in the practice of memory’s background.

The problem of affect and affectivity plays a significant role in psychoanalysis, both at a theoretical and therapeutic level. In Freud’s first interpretation of hysterical symptoms affect is considered as a certain amount of energy, and this already mirrors its aporetic intertwining with the ‘reality’ of the unconscious. On the one side, it is true that, in his Metapsychology, Freud identifies the charge of affect with instinct and explains that only ideational representation, not the affection, is found at the unconscious level. This means that affectivity is something concerning the preconscious and conscious psychic life. However, on the other side, the existence of a ‘representative’ dimension within the unconscious opens the way of a dual or bifacial re-reading of it, beyond the biological-organic constitution Freud assigned to the Unbewusst. For Paul Ricœur, Freud’s psychoanalysis has a double, irreducible theoretical-procedural register, energetistic and hermeneutical; and his research about the unconscious reality reveals the significance and consequences of this double/dualistic approach. A combination of Husserl’s phenomenological and Ricœur’s hermeneutical approaches helps to find a “third, mediative way”, in which the unconscious can be reinterpreted as a “affective matter”, that is a mid-way reality placed between corporality and non-corporality, body and mind, natural causality and experiential/existential meaning.

This study focuses on the important epistemological question of the objectivity of scientific knowledge by comparing the analyses and theories developed in the two different schools of hermeneutics and pragmatism. To justify the feasibility of the comparison, we proceed from the observation that, albeit in different ways, authors such as Gadamer and Peirce revolutionize the idea of experience and its theoretical scientific relevance issuing in a new conception of cognitive truth bearing fruits to the problem of objectivity. This comparison is intertwined with the critical resumption of Betti’s theoretical scientific research, which is useful for illustrating the articulation of this problem and the scope of the operations implemented in the context of contemporary hermeneutics and for probing the problem of scientific objectivity beyond the fields of the historical and social sciences. This possibility can be glimpsed by absorbing Betti’s approach to the problem of humanities into a theory of knowledge where a position of critical realism is associated with an interpretative component in hermeneutic and pragmatic keys.

Today’s crisis of the human and social sciences is there for all to see. This is a complex problem resulting from an equally complex dynamism that implies the spirit of the times, the interests and values orientations which prevail today. We live in an era of materialism, an era of new paganism that institutionalizes the superiority of the natural sciences and naturalizing paradigms. This article tries to show how a certain philosophical approach can contribute, on the on hand, to the dialectical reorganization of the framework of sciences and knowledge and, on the other, to the recognition of the perpetual value of the human and social sciences.

Starting thematising Paul Ricoeur’s tardive recognition in France, the author examines in this paper the reception of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical research in Italy and the role played by this Nation. He particularly focuses on the contribution offered by Domenico Jervolino and Naples’ Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (IISF). The perspective of a scholar emerges which both sustained as well as influenced Ricoeur’s work of research and realized in Naples one of the most important laboratories of study and research around different themes. He also generated an original, extraordinarily significant and actual philosophical perspective, that of a philosophy of translation.

Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical work expresses a well defined speculative methodology. By ‘extracting’ this methodology from his philosophy it is possible to profile the model of a critical hermeneutics, that is a theoretical and speculative procedure able to work in a general, independent and original way. The essential methodological and epistemological structure of this philosophical and procedural approach lies in Ricoeur’s arc herméneutique theory; and Ricoeur’s speculative work itself offers several examples of its availability and strength – from the reinterpretation of Freud’s psychoanalysis to the work around dilemmas concerning historical knowledge and historiography, from studies on human and social sciences to anthropological philosophy, and beyond. Starting from the analysis of critical hermeneutics’ structure and its connections with Ricoeur’s philosophy, the Author wants to demonstrate why and in which manner critical hermeneutics can constitutes a significant and productive way for today and tomorrow’s philosophical and scientific research.

By following Ricœur’s perspective, this article aims to develop a reflection around the anthropological bases of ethics, or even, around an anthropological-hermeneutical conception of ethics. The author starts from an analysis of the key notions of affectivity and initiative to demonstrate how personal identity is formed via a hermeneutic course of emancipation as an ethical challenge. The capacity to become a person characterises Ricœur’s view on the human being. The person is the product of a process, within a difficult and contradictory dialectic between different instances.

This paper focuses on Ricoeur’s conception of the capable human being; a conception that interprets personal identity as constituted through a hermeneutical process which is simultaneously a vertical dialectic of self-emancipation and a horizontal dialectic of recognition. Ricoeur’s speculative investigations around the human being progresses in parallel with the evolution of his hermeneutical conception, from the paradigm of an interpretation of symbols and myths to the analysis of text and narration, thence to phenomenological hermeneutics of the self, and finally to the hermeneutics of translation and recognition. It is in particular the latter movement that allows a productive dialogue with Levinas and Ricoeur on vulnerability and intersubjectivity.

The series of notes gathered in this paper mirrors the complexity of populism: from the tendency to have a negative use of the concept to its semantic and rhetoric-communicative vagueness; from an undetermined historical-theoretical integration of the concept to a theoretical-practical, cultural and ideological differentiation (which invites us to discuss ‘populisms’ instead of ‘populism’); from the problem of the classification of different forms of populism to the study of new expressions of it (which, prevalently, is an effect of the vast circulation and use of new social technologies); and from the opportunity to deepen fundamental mechanisms that are the bases in formation of the populist representational discourse, movement and active response to the necessity of a wide interdisciplinary work of research. By sketching hypothesis, collecting questions and indicating problematic cruxes, this paper tries to discuss the possible contribution of philosophy (which is prevalently identified with critical hermeneutics), and the ideal interdisciplinary set-up (which is essentially defined considering a possible connection between social psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, communication theory and new media).

The twentieth century was deeply influenced by theoretical-practical and reflective developments in philosophical hermeneutics. It introduced a large range of problems, content and perspectives, on a vast referential and implicational (inter-)disciplinary scale, to enter into the real orbit of a philosophical koinè, not for a decennary or few decennaries (Vattimo), but for a century and more. It expressed the productivity, significance and heuristic strength of research and thought that hit different scientific domains, particularly (but not exclusively) the human and social sciences: from psychology to sociology, from psychoanalysis to literature, from semiotic to biblical exegesis, from anthropology to linguistics, from rhetoric to narratology, from history to law and from political theory to religion.