Silvia Benso

Brian Schroeder

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. Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Brian Schroeder is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Art, Interpretation, and Freedom in the Philosophy of Luigi Pareyson

Thinking the Inexhaustible

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.

Levinas and the Ancients

Elvira Roncalli

A unique portrayal of the theoretical positions of eleven Italian women thinkers who share the practice of philosophy and extend philosophical work and interests beyond the realm of the discipline strictly defined.

Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking

This volume gathers fourteen contributions written by Italian philosophers within the context of the precariousness and vulnerability revealed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic compels us to rethink what is affected most by this global occurrence yet does not end with it—that is, life. Beyond the geographical, socio-political, and medical contexts in which the reflections originate, Rethinking Life is deeply utopian, presenting aspirations toward a different configuration of life and collective living centered on relational subjectivities, interconnectedness, interdependence, and, ultimately, solidarity. How does the pandemic—what it represents and exposes—call us to rethink our notion of life? How does an episode of morbidity affect a fuller understanding of life? Can such a hermeneutic shift be dared and sustained? The sobriety of the reflections yields elegant, incisive, and direct prose of profound effect and immediacy—and a captivating, lucid, and thought-provoking narrative.

Italian Philosophy in Precarious Times

Rethinking Life

A resolute defense of philosophy and hermeneutics against the threats of dogmatism and relativism. Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991) was one of the most important Italian philosophers to emerge after World War II and stands shoulder to shoulder with fellow hermeneutic thinkers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The product of a well-developed theory of interpretation that stretches back to the late 1940s, his 1971 masterpiece Truth and Interpretation provides the historical impetus and theoretical framework for the questions of existence, art, and politics that would motivate his most famous students, Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. In a time when the meaning of truth as an interpretation is challenged by the chaotic din of media on the one side and the violent force of absolute claims from science, religion, and political economy on the other, Pareyson’s meditation on the value of thinking that is shaped by the traditions of philosophy and yet responds to contemporary demands remains timely and pressing more than forty years after its initial publication.

Truth and Interpretation

Engages Levinas and Heidegger on the provocative issue of an ethics of things.

A Different Side of Ethics

Face of Things, The

Firsthand perspectives on the past, present, and future of contemporary Italian philosophy. Through conversations with twenty-three leading Italian philosophers representing a variety of scholarly concerns and methodologies, this volume offers an informal overview of the background, breadth, and distinctiveness of contemporary Italian philosophy as a tradition. The conversations begin with general questions addressing issues of provenance, domestic and foreign influences, and lineages. Next, each scholar discusses the main tenets, theoretical originality, and timeliness of their work. The interviews conclude with thoughts about what directions each philosopher sees the discipline heading in the future. Every conversation is a testimony to the differences that characterize each thinker as unique and that invigorate the Italian philosophical landscape as a whole. The individual replies differ widely in tone, focus, and style. What emerges is a broad, deep, lively, and even witty picture of the Italian philosophical landscape in the voices of its protagonists.

Conversations with Italian Philosophers

Viva Voce

A unique portrayal of the theoretical positions of eleven Italian women thinkers who share the practice of philosophy and extend philosophical work and interests beyond the realm of the discipline strictly defined. 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. Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author and editor of several books, including Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers, also published by SUNY Press. Elvira Roncalli is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carroll College.

Stretching the Art of Thinking

Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers

Antonio Calcagno

Offers a dialogue about the future of the nature of the human, technology, metaphysical foundations, globalization, and social and political oppression. In order to create a greater dialogue between new and emerging Italian philosophy and established continental traditions of thought, Silvia Benso and Antonio Calcagno bring together the work of well-known figures in Italian philosophy such as Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Remo Bodei, Gianni Vattimo, Massimo Cacciari, and Adriana Cavarero with important thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Schmitt, Heidegger, Gadamer, Irigaray, Arendt, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault. In Open Borders, Benso and Calcagno introduce to a larger English-speaking audience the thought of highly regarded late twentieth-century Italian philosophers who seek to redefine concepts such as freedom, interpretation, existence, woman, male-female relationships, realism, emotions, and aesthetics. The diverse contributors to this book often transgress and redefine the limits and insights of philosophy itself and bring to the fore a new body of thinking that offers new ways of self-understanding while deeply engaging the issues and questions of contemporary society. Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author, editor, and translator of many books, including Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers; Aesthetics of the Virtual; and Thinking the Inexhaustible: Art, Interpretation, and Freedom in the Philosophy of Luigi Pareyson, all published by SUNY Press. Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He is the author and editor of several books, including Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy (coedited with Inna Viriasova) and the translator of Lea Melandri’s Love and Violence: The Vexatious Factors of Civilization, both also published by SUNY Press.

Encounters between Italian Philosophy and Continental Thought

Open Borders

Roberto Esposito

Massimo Donà

Donatella Di Cesare

Emanuele Severino

Massimo Adinolfi

Gérard Bensussan

Gennaro Carillo

Giuseppe Cantillo

Massimo Cacciari

Jean-François Courtine

Giannino Di Tommaso

Biagio de Giovanni

Adriano Fabris

Félix Duque

Franco Ferrari

Ernesto Forcellino

Bruno Forte

Romano Gasparotti

Giulio Giorello

Giulio Goria

Enrica Lisciani-Petrini

Eugenio Mazzarella

Giuseppe Moro

Edoardo Mirri

Giacomo Petrarca

Gaetano Rametta

Enrico Redaelli

Valerio Rocco Lozano

Rocco Ronchi

Carlo Sini

Luigi Vero Tarca

Andrea Tagliapietra

Fulvio Tessitore

Francesco Tomatis

Aldo Trione

Francesco Valagussa

Carlo Invernizzi

Andrea Bellantone

Il centro di questo libro è fuori del libro, in altri libri: nell’opera di Vincenzo Vitiello, con la quale gli autori dei saggi qui raccolti si sono nel tempo confrontati. Per gli ottant’anni del filosofo, hanno accolto volentieri l’idea di proseguire per un altro tratto un colloquio, che riprende autori e domande fondamentali del pensiero occidentale – da Platone a Aristotele, da Kant a Hegel, da Nietzsche a Heidegger a molti altri –, in una pluralità di prospettive e di proposte che dimostra la fecondità del dialogo tenuto nel corso di questi anni da alcune delle maggiori voci della filosofia contemporanea. In filosofia non esistono tradizioni che non vengano sempre nuovamente rimesse in questione. La forma stessa del mettere in questione, del logon didonai, ha da essere interrogata circa il suo statuto e i suoi titoli di legittimità. Una scepsi radicale attraversa dunque il pensiero filosofico. «Chi vuole che la sua parola abbia senso, deve farsi forte di ciò che a tutti è comune e ha senso»: così si legge in un frammento di Eraclito: nei testi che qui si presentano, la filosofia e i filosofi che la praticano danno forza a ciò che è loro comune, ma insieme sperimentano anche l’infirmitas di questa forza, secondo la lezione più cara a Vincenzo Vitiello.

Per gli ottant’anni di Vincenzo Vitiello

Trovarsi accanto

Essays describe Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s unique and radical hermeneutic philosophy.

The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo

Between Nihilism and Politics

Silvia Benso

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