Originally conceived as a paper to be held in a conference, this essay complete Adalberto Coltellucio’s reconstruction of the debate about the notions of contradiction in the Italian interpretation, taking into account the debate between Lucio Colletti and Emanuele Severino occured at the end of 1970s and the early 80s about the nature of dialectics, the real and (or) logical contradiction, the principle of non-contradiction.

This third part of the reflection upon the notions of dialectics follows the first part (focused on the interpetations derived from the Marxian tradition, especially by Della Volpe and Colletti, and those coming from the historical and genetic consideration developed by Merker, Rossi, Varnier, Raspa and Biscuso), and the second part (dedicated to the coherentist interpreters, such as Marconi and Berto, and to the para-coherentis ones, such as Severino and Bettineschi) – which were published in the last issues of Filosofia Italiana. Now the author examines the non-coherentist and anti-coherentist interpretations (by Renato Milan, Sergio Landucci, Enrico Berti, Franco Chiereghin, Sergio Bernini, Massimo Donà, Massimiliano Biscuso, Federico Peralda and Michela Bordignon). Despite every difference in their approaches, these interpreters do agree in the belief that Hegel put offside the principle of non-contradiction.

Through the historical and genetic reconstruction of Spaventa’s reflection upon the first logical categories in Hegel’s philosophy, this paper seeks to show how Spaventa broke up the dialectic, while he tried to defend it against the critiques, that several thinkers had moved to it, starting from Trendelenburg. Compared with Gentile’s later position, Spaventa did not notice the idea of a decay of the ‘thought’ into the ‘being’ and never came to unify the form of thought with its matter, the logical act with being. He rather conceived the thought, someway as Kant had done, as the origin of everything – that is, the being would never enter the sphere of determination without the work of the thought.

My aim in this essay is to examine a particular aspect of Ernesto De Martino’s reflection about XX century decline of the West: what he calls crisis of religious sciences. With this expression, the Italian philosopher and ethnologist refers to the triumph of irrationalist and anti-historicist leanings within contemporary studies on religion, magic, myth, rite, symbols. Through the analysis of a large number of De Martino’s books, articles and reviews, I draw attention to the difference between the various phases of his philosophical itinerary (from the juvenile reflection about civil religion, through the project of the historicist ethnology, until the studies on magic in the South, and the last and incomplete book on the end of the world), trying to show how the initial faith in Historicism (regarded as the solution to the crisis of religious sciences) has been replaced, after the break with Italian Communist Party, by the paradoxical theory that Historicism itself is the main cause of western culture’s decline and that, therefore, contemporary irrationalism is, in a certain way, right.

This essay proposes to examine the relationship between Rhetoric and Philosophy in Vico’s Institutiones Oratorie and other writings, except for The New Science. Far from being only a merely theoretical notion, eloquence is at the core of Vico’s philosophy, as a political and pedagogical tool and an improvement of human nature as well.

In this interview, Vincenzo Costa reports about his personal way of interpreting and developing Husserl’s phenomenology, referring to his work as a translator of the Husserlian main writings in Italian as well as to his examination of other philosophers (such as Stumpf and Derrida), whose thought he takes into account to propose a profitable lecture of Husserl’s phenomenology today – starting from the problems of our very current time.

La presente bibliografia, redatta nel dicembre 2013, risponde ad un esigenza, sempre più
sentita fra gli studiosi, di uno strumento di lavoro indispensabile per una ricostruzione adeguata, completa e coesa del pensiero di Giorgio Agamben (22 aprile 1942).