SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

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.

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 In their differences, these previously unpublished essays give the reader a glimpse of the fecund and articulated philosophical work of women in the Italian context-a context which has not been and still is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

Offering, for the first time, a full historicized accounting of philosophical archaeology, Ido Govrin delineates how this overarching method of historical inquiry has today become associated, to a large extent, with the work of Giorgio Agamben-and how it constitutes Agamben's philosophy of history in particular. As befits a book situated at an intellectual crossroads that brings together a range of discourses-philosophy, history, aesthetics, theology and philology-Govrin conceives of philosophical archaeology as a multifaceted concept, on a broad scale. The discussion slides along the length of the multilateral fault line and into the related fields of contemporary art and art history/theory. In doing so, it illuminates the potential for philosophical archaeology, as an artistic modus operandi in the broader context of contemporary art, to expand our conception of history and historiographic research, and for this sense of history to expand our conception of art, in turn. At stake in this consideration is the possibility of a new, materially based philosophy of history.

Essays describe Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo's unique and radical hermeneutic philosophy. This is the first collection of essays in English that deals directly with the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo from a purely critical perspective, further establishing his rightful place in contemporary European philosophy. Vattimo, who first came to prominence as the translator of Gadamer's Truth and Method into Italian, is now considered to be more than a philosopher and prolific author. As a former member of the European Parliament (1999-2004), he is also a public intellectual. This book takes up his call to advance the crucial active and affirmative engagement with thinking and society. More than just interpretations of Vattimo's thinking, these essays are expressions of the new impetus given to hermeneutic philosophy by "weak thought," the term he coined for how we think now in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The development of Vattimo's thinking is reflected in the organization of the volume, divided into three main parts: Hermeneutics and Nihilism, Metaphysics and Religion, and Politics and Technology.

Demonstrates how the ethical underpinning of Hegel's political and social philosophy has relevance for contemporary democratic life. The legal regulations and formal rules of democracy alone are not enough to hold a society together and govern its processes. Yet the irreducible ethical pluralism that characterizes contemporary society seems to make it impossible to impose a single system of values as a source of social cohesion and identity reference. In this book, Lucio Cortella argues that Hegel's theory of ethical life can provide such a grounding and makes the case through an analysis of Hegel's central political work, the Philosophy of Right. Although Hegel did not support democratic political ends and wrote in a historical and cultural context far removed from the current liberal-democratic scene, Cortella maintains that the Hegelian theory of ethical life, with its emphasis on securing a framework conducive to human freedom, nevertheless offers a convincing response to the problem of the ethical uprootedness of contemporary democracy.

Analyzes key concepts and arguments in the work of one of Europe's leading philosophers. One of Europe's leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito's political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito's reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito's philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns.

A penetrating and freewheeling evaluation of Kant's magnum opus. A best seller in Italy, Maurizio Ferraris's Goodbye, Kant! delivers a nontechnical, entertaining, and occasionally irreverent overview of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He borrows his title from Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin!, the 2003 film about East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which depicts both relief at the passing of the Soviet era and affection for the ideals it embodied. Ferraris approaches Kant in similar spirits, demonstrating how the structure that Kant elaborates for the understanding of human knowledge can generate nostalgia for lost aspirations, while still leaving room for constructive criticism. Isolating key themes and concerns in the work, Ferraris evaluates Kant's claims relative to what science and philosophy have come to regard as the conditions for knowledge and experience in the intervening two centuries. He remains attentive to the historical context and ideals from which Kant's Critique emerged but also resolute in identifying what he sees as the limits and blind spots in the work. The result is an accessible account of a notoriously difficult book that will both provoke experts and introduce students to the work and to these important philosophical debates about the relations of experience to science. Maurizio Ferraris is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin in Italy. His many books include Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, also translated by Richard Davies. Richard Davies is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and author of Descartes: Belief, Scepticism and Virtue.

Advances a hermeneutic conception of truth as a mode of being, in dialogue with Aristotle, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Heidegger, Putnam, and Rorty. What does it mean to say that something is true? In this book Gaetano Chiurazzi argues that when we say that something is true, we do not say something merely about a state of affairs, but also about ourselves. Truth is not just the fact of "what is out there," but a mode of existence that shapes and transforms human understanding. Supported by an original reading of Aristotle's theory of judgment and Heidegger's hermeneutical theory of truth, Chiurazzi also engages the work of Nietzsche, Gadamer, Putnam, and Rorty to challenge the rising tide of theories that dismiss the importance of human experience to the idea of truth. Gaetano Chiurazzi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy. Robert T. Valgenti is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College.

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.

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. Ugo Perone is Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Università Del Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli, Italy. He is the author of several books, including The Truth of Feeling and Despite the Subject. Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics; translator and coeditor (with Brian Schroeder) of Contemporary Italian Philosophy: Crossing the Borders of Ethics, Politics, and Religion; coeditor (with Brian Schroeder) of Between Nihilism and Politics: The Hermeneutics of Gianni Vattimo; and co-translator (with Brian Schroeder) of Carlo Sini's Ethics of Writing, all published by SUNY Press. Brian Schroeder is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the coeditor (with Lissa McCullough) of Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, also published by SUNY Press.

Traces the decline of beauty as an ideal from early German romanticism to the twentieth century. The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde movement, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook.

Highlights and critically assesses the work of contemporary Italian political philosophers. Italy has a rich philosophical legacy, and recent developments and movements in its political philosophy have produced a significant body of thought by internationally renowned philosophers working on questions and themes such as the critique of neoliberalism, statehood, politics and culture, feminism, community, the stranger, and the relationship between politics and action. This volume brings this conversation to English-language readers, considering well-known Italian philosophers such as Vattimo, Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, as well as philosophers with whom English-language readers are less acquainted, such as Luce Fabbri, Adriana Cavarero, and Lea Melandri. In addition, the essays extend the conversation beyond the realm of Italian philosophy, bringing its thinkers into dialogue with philosophical figures including Badiou, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano.

The Future of the World Is Open examines the work and thought of three prominent Italian feminist philosophers, Lea Melandri, Luisa Muraro, and Adriana Cavarero, as it delves into the significant experiences that shaped them, highlighting their converging and diverging positions. Also appearing here for the first time in English translation are three essays by renowned author, journalist, and political figure Rossana Rossanda. Rossanda's essays offer a critical perspective on some of the contentious theoretical nodes with which Italian feminist thought has wrestled. Written in terse and engaging language, this book explores challenging philosophical and political questions, with themes including masculine domination; the body as the site of sedimented lived experience; sexual difference; the symbolic; the imaginary; feminine political authority; feminine subjectivity; and material humanism. A vivid picture of the socio-political context of Italian feminism emerges-illuminating its strong commitment to practice-and informing and enriching contemporary discussions at the intersection of different disciplinary perspectives.

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.

The essays collected here outline a geophilosophy of the Mediterranean-a sea of great importance in the history of Europe and the wider West. Conceived from a geophilosophical perspective, the Mediterranean is a sea surrounded by lands-that is, a "pluriverse" of different cultures and religions, which have often become entangled in conflicts. Nevertheless, they have also demonstrated a remarkable capacity for coexistence, as exemplified by multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious Sicily during the reign of Roger II of Hauteville. Throughout its millennia-long history, the Mediterranean has consistently displayed a profoundly unified configuration despite its inherent diversity. Its distinctive blend of singularity and plurality can serve as a paradigm for rethinking new forms of social and political coexistence, not only for Europe, which draws its origin from this sea, but also for a new global order.

Elena Pulcini (1950–2021), an internationally renowned philosopher of care, was at the forefront of thinking and creating a new ethical framework to respond efficaciously to problems that affect individuals at a global level. This translation of Pulcini's last work addresses perhaps the two fundamental questions for our times-namely, "Why care for others when we are not bound by personal relationships?" and "Why commit to justice even when it does not personally affect us?" By focusing on passions such as indignation, fear, compassion, resentment, and love, Pulcini offers an alternative ethical perspective in which justice and care intertwine to supplement and balance each other. Together, care and justice are proven capable of addressing the challenge of the "other," distant in space (the outsider, the marginalized, and the migrant) and time (future generations). In the end, Pulcini proposes a form of moral education that nurtures and develops desirable moral sentiments for a more just world at the interpersonal, social, political, economic, and environmental levels, thereby providing an alternative social, global model to current individual-focused, rights-based, purely rationalist ethical systems.

Living in a province dominated by powerful oligarchs, Giambattista Vico (1668—1744) concluded that political philosophy should work to undermine aristocratic authority and prevent political devolution into feudalism. Rejecting the possibility that the free market could successfully instill civil behavior, he advocated for a strong central judicial system to work closely with citizens to promote stability and justice. This study puts Vico in conversation with other Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Mandeville to show how his alternative warrants serious consideration. In contrast to scholars who read Vico's New Science as a defense of the imagination, this study casts his account of poetic wisdom politically as an epistemological critique of the aristocratic mentality. Myth and Authority argues that Vico's depiction of pagan religion is a refined attempt to explain how oligarchy maintains its stranglehold on power. While Western civilization did not follow the path Vico suggested, it may now be more relevant as concerns grow about the increasing influence of the wealthy on civil institutions.

Nine masterful essays on Dante’s Divine Comedy and his political theology by one of today’s leading Italian philosophers. Among today's Italian philosophers, Massimo Cacciari is perhaps the most assiduous commentator of Dante. Philosophy, Mysticism, and the Political collects all of Cacciari's writings on Dante to this day, from his masterful analysis of St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Paradiso and Giotto's frescoes to a new consideration of Dante's "European" idea of empire as a federation of nations, peoples, and languages. Cacciari does not force Dante into any philosophical straitjacket. Rather, he walks with Dante, takes notes, asks questions, raises issues, and tries to understand the Divine Comedy in Dante's terms. Cacciari approaches Dante's Ulysses and the theologico-philosophical vertigo of Paradiso not as a critic but from the point of view of a faithful, assiduous, perceptive, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes worshipful reader. Cacciari's analysis shows once more that Dante does not belong to the past. Dante creates his own age and stays with us whenever we wish to follow his path.

An aesthetic and phenomenological account of feelings. In this book, Tonino Griffero introduces and analyzes an ontological category he terms "quasi-things." These do not exist fully in the traditional sense as substances or events, yet they powerfully act on us and on our states of mind. He offers an original approach to the study of emotions, regarding them not as inner states of the subject, but as atmospheres, that is as powers poured out into the lived space we inhabit. Griffero first outlines the general and atmospheric characters of quasi-things, and then considers examples such as pain, shame, the gaze, and twilight-which he argues is responsible for penetrating and suggestive moods precisely because of its vagueness. With frequent examples from literature and everyday life, Quasi-Things provides an accessible aesthetic and phenomenological account of feelings based on the paradigm of atmospheres. Tonino Griffero is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the author of many books, including Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Sarah De Sanctis is General Manager of the UK branch of Labont (Laboratory for Ontology). She is the translator of Manifesto of New Realism, by Maurizio Ferraris, also published by SUNY Press.

Analyzes the role of community in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one's share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory.

Retraces the history of postmodern philosophy and proposes solutions to overcome its impasses. Philosophical realism has taken a number of different forms, each applied to different topics and set against different forms of idealism and subjectivism. Maurizio Ferraris's Manifesto of New Realism takes aim at postmodernism and hermeneutics, arguing against their emphasis on reality as constructed and interpreted. While acknowledging the value of these criticisms of traditional, dogmatic realism, Ferraris insists that the insights of postmodernism have reached a dead end. Calling for the discipline to turn its focus back to truth and the external world, Ferraris's manifesto-which sparked lively debate in Italy and beyond-offers a wiser realism with social and political relevance. Maurizio Ferraris is Full Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Laboratory for Ontology at the University of Turin, Italy. His books include Goodbye, Kant! What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason, also published by SUNY Press. Sarah De Sanctis is a PhD candidate in contemporary forms of realism in literature and philosophy at the London Graduate School and a translator for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Turin.

An original reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger that paved the way for Vattimo's conception of weak thought. In Beyond the Subject Gianni Vattimo offers a reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger that shows how the premises to overcome the metaphysical Subject were already embedded in their thought. Vattimo makes a case for a Nietzsche who is not concerned with the structure and glorification of the Overman, but rather with its opposite, by showing how it is the single individual who must see and accept his/her potential and then excel and develop an inner strength and ethic. He reads Heidegger as concerned with the inevitable distortion present in every interpretation, which, when confronted and accepted, humbles us to deal with a less overarching telos or Grund, and makes us more attuned to contingency and interpersonal communication-what Vattimo calls a "weakened" notion of being. These original readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger pave the way for Vattimo's concept of weak thought and open up to a future social ethic that is less agonistic and more community oriented. This edition includes two supplementary essays from 1986 and 1988 that expand on the same themes, providing a deeper look at an important decade in the development of Vattimo's thought.

Systematically addresses the philosophical implications of the postcolonial. In this book, Emanuela Fornari systematically examines the philosophical implications of postcolonial studies. She considers postcolonial critique not as a school or a current of thought but rather as a multiform constellation that-from the celebrated Orientalism of Edward Said to the contributions of authors like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty-has called into question the assumptions that underlie key concepts in the history of philosophy. Fornari addresses themes such as history and memory, borders, the subject, and translation, engaging classical authors such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx alongside more contemporary theorizations by authors such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière.

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. Robert T. Valgenti is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. Silvia Benso is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Argues that affirming the irreducible differences between men and women can lead to more transformative politics than the struggle for abstract equality between the sexes. In The Symbolic Order of the Mother Luisa Muraro identifies the bond between mother and child as ontologically fundamental to the development of culture and politics, and therefore as key to achieving truly emancipatory political change. Both corporeal development and language acquisition, which are the sources of all thinking, begin in this relationship. However, Western civilization has been defined by men, and Muraro recalls the admiration and envy she felt for the great philosophers as she strove to become one herself, as well as the desire for independence that opposed her to her mother. This conflict between philosophy and culture on the one hand and the relationship with the mother on the other constitutes the root of patriarchy's symbolic disorder, which blocks women's (and men's) access to genuine freedom. Muraro appeals to the feminist practice of gratitude to the mother and the recognition of her authority as a model of unconditional nurture and support that must be restored. This, she argues, is the symbolic order of the mother that must overcome the disorder of patriarchy. The mediating power of the mother tongue constitutes a symbolic order that comes before all others, for both women and men.

An assessment and reevaluation of nihilism's ascendency over metaphysics. Challenging the idea that nihilism has supplanted metaphysics, Vittorio Possenti finds in this philosophical turn the grounds for a mature renewal of metaphysics. Possenti takes the reader on a "third voyage" that goes beyond the "second voyage" indicated by Plato in the Phaedo. He traces the ascendancy of nihilism in philosophy, offering critical examinations of Nietzsche, Gentile, Heidegger, Habermas, Husserl, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Vattimo. With penetrating accounts of philosophical movements such as hermeneutics and logical empiricism, rich with both historical and theoretical insights, Possenti provides a compelling defense of the power of human reason to apprehend the most obvious but also the most profound aspect of things: that they exist. By exploring the ubiquity of nihilism and probing its philosophical roots, Possenti clears the way for a fresh reformulation of metaphysics.

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber's account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of "profit for profit's sake"-an aspect of Weber's work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri.

Reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts in relation to the novelty introduced by virtual bodies. Arguing that the virtual body is something new-namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world-Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings-they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.

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.

Adriana Cavarero has been, and continues to be, one of the most innovative and influential voices in Italian political and feminist thought of the last forty years. Known widely for her challenges to the male-dominated canon of political philosophy (and philosophy more broadly construed), Cavarero has offered provocative accounts of what constitutes the political, with an emphasis on embodiment, singularity, and relationality. Political Bodies gathers some of today's most prominent and well-established theorists, along with emerging scholars, to contribute their insights, questions, and concerns about Cavarero's political philosophy and to put her work in conversation with other feminist thinkers, political theorists, queer theorists, and thinkers of race and coloniality. A new essay by Adriana Cavarero herself closes out the volume. Political Bodies ventures beyond the familiar boundaries of Cavarero's own writing and is a testament to the generative encounters that her philosophy makes possible.

A profound meditation on Leopardi's art and thought as well as a reframing and reassertion of Negri's own philosophical and political project of liberation. Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition-a uniquely Italian one-that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt. Antonio Negri is the coauthor (with Michael Hardt) of Empire; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire; and Commonwealth. Timothy S. Murphy is Houston-Truax-Wentz Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. He has translated several of Negri's works, including Trilogy of Resistance; Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy; and Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations.