This text aims to combine interests and inputs deriving from my experience at the Istituto italiano per gli studi storici in Naples. The paper is designed not so much to increase the reader’s knowledge of the “objective” history of the Institute, as to define – from specific perspectives – the various stages of a cultural itinerary made up of impressions and influences, including emotional ones, that enriched and often mingled with intellectual reflection. The main topic is the history of the intellectual roots and development of the Istituto italiano per gli studi storici as we know it today. The paper explores several issues: the problem of anti-academicism, the relationship between Croce and young people, historicism, the connection between philosophy and philology, and moral progress in history. The purpose is to identify in Croce’s original project – and in its controversial implementation – the conditions that allow us to outline the development of the activities of the Institute and the continuation of its work in view of future challenges.

The essay is related to the thought of Giambattista Vico which the author, by using a definition of Giuseppe Capograssi, interprets as a philosophy of the dawn and of the origins of historical reason against an abstract reason, a reason at sunset time which fixes the reality in cold conceptual schemes. In this perspective, The New Science is shown as an opening to the modernity and as a vision of the life as freedom for the humanity to progress or decay.

Starting from Vico’s thought, my attempt in the present paper is to examine the primary tension between rational identity and historical difference within the European tradition. In this way, I want to establish Vico’s usefulness for a reconsideration of mythic, religious and even national pluralism. Upon adumbrating my own theoretical position towards a mythic paradigm, which I develop in line with and in response to the work of Hans Blumenberg (§1), I turn to the key distinction that Vico makes between the natural sciences, which are grounded in the rationalism of the cogito, and the social sciences, which posit constructivist arguments that depend on human sensibility (§2). Subsequently, I investigate Vico’s refusal to subordinate mythos to hegemonic logos (§3), before concluding with some brief reflections on the epistemological and hermeneutic stakes implied by Vico’s demonstrations (§4). Rather than provide any comprehensive or exhaustive account, I take a more desultory approach that should amply exhibit how Vico’s work can counter propagandist appropriations of mythic and religious material.

The joint interview to Lomonaco and Pansera verges to highlight the effects of the new reform of teaching Philosophy in the secondary school, which provides the opportunity to teach Philosophy by anyone who has achieved a master or a specialist degree in Anthropology and Ethnology, Educational Science, Science of religions, Planning and Management of educational and training services. The access to the Philosophy tuition is also available to anyone who has obtained a Communication Sciences or Political Sciences degree.

A variety of interests and suggestions has characterized Paolo D’Angelo’s research path within the field of Aesthetics. In this interview, D’Angelo follows the main threads that run throughout his very first steps as a scholar, leading finally to his last books, Le nevrosi di Manzoni and Il problema Croce. Alongside with discussing his own peculiar way of interpreting and practicing Aesthetics, D’Angelo draws an outline of the contemporary Italian and international philosophical culture.

The interview traces the different stages of the story of the «Rivista Trimestrale» and reconstructs the role that it had in the political cultural and philosophical Italian debate since the sixties. In the interview, Marcello Mustè shows the way in which many of the insights and reflections that were developed within this research laboratory have anticipated historical scenarios which have been outlined starting from the 1989, and continue to provide valuable tools for the reflection about our contemporaneity.