2024-03Thematic Section
Philosophy as a Spiritual Way of Life and the Utopia of a University Without Condition

Abstract: Starting from the premise, recently shared by authors such as Jacques Derrida and Pierre Macherey (for whom a state of crisis is inherent to the university) that of the humanities constitute the specific terrain in which to propose new experiments, this article attempts to verify what is at stake in an approach to philosophy as a way of life, in the context…

2024-03Thematic Section
Philosophy as a Way of Life, the System, and the Advent of the Research University: Contributions Toward an Unwritten Chapter of the History of PWL

Abstract: This paper forms as it were a draft for an as-yet-unwritten, decisive chapter on the history of philosophy as a way of life (PWL). It closely examines the texts by Schleiermacher, Fichte, Humboldt, and Schelling on the foundation of the modern research university, and the place of philosophy within it, written in the years surrounding the formation…

2024-03Thematic Section
Hadot Among the Medievalists: Revisiting the Historiography on “Intellectual Felicity” in the Thirteenth Century

Abstract: The reception of Hadot’s work on the tradition of spiritual exercises among historians of medieval philosophy has rarely produced the results one might reasonably have expected. In this revisitation of the historiography on the notion of “intellectual felicity,” I thus hope to be able first to provide a corrective to the faulty understanding that some medievalists still seem…

2024-02Thematic Section
The Saving Order of Science: New Atheist Sam Harris’s Scientism is not Fundamentalism but Affective Attachment to a Salvific Epistemology

Abstract: The New Atheist movement has been called “fundamentalist” in its allegiance to science. While true that New Atheism is remarkable among the various historical formations of atheism for its championing of the sciences, it is not fundamentalist. Where it does share a resemblance to Christian fundamentalism is in their respective attachments to a salvific epistemology either…

2024-02Thematic Section
The Therapeutic Role of the Monastic Environment for Individuals with ASC: The Case of Hildegard of Bingen and her Lingua Ignota

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to show how a monastic environment can be regarded as providing shelter for individuals with autism spectrum condition in the Middle Ages. By drawing on the recent literature in the history of medicine that traces the signs and symptoms of ASC in Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess from the twelfth century, we will…

2024-01Thematic Section
Agalmatophilic Pygmalions: Burke and Winckelmann on the Beautiful and the Sublime

Abstract: There is a good chance that “each critic becomes a Pygmalion” (as Leo Curran put it) when they bring the work of art to life in their narcissistic (and almost amorous) attention, unfolding its meaning so that they should be able to write their own interpretation. The starting point of the present text is the perfection…

2024-01Thematic Section
Taste(s) and common sense(s)

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between common sense and taste in the history of aesthetic thought. “Common sense” guarantees the communication of tastes through different modalities. It can either facilitate agreement among individuals, fostering mutual understanding and envisaging a universal aesthetic community, or provoke disagreement. In the former scenario, common sense is literally…

2023-04Thematic Section
Nothingness at the Intersection of Science, Philosophy, and Religion

Abstract: This contribution examines the effects that a philosophical consideration of nothing has on the debate between theism and atheism. In particular, it argues that surprising conclusions that arise from a close analysis of the concept of nothing result in three claims that have relevance for that debate. Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion…

2023-04Thematic Section
Quantum Meta-physics: Nonlocality and Limits of Determinism

Abstract: This essay aims to show that the recent development of quantum theory may provide us with an answer to one of the most compelling metaphysical problems, namely the problem of determinism. First, I sketch the conceptual background and draw the distinction between metaphysical and epistemological determinisms. Then, on the ground of the analysis…

2023-04Thematic Section
From Here to Theology: Response to Joshua Farris

Abstract: Joshua Farris usefully applies my distinction between conditioned and de-conditioned philosophy to some limits of science, and the disclosure of the soul. It is argued that further de-conditioning is conducive to answering the profound philosophical questions: What is it to be now?, and What is it to be? but these answers are only adequate when they entail the…