This book is an inquiry into the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus’ mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. The methodological focus of my thesis has led me to pay particular attention to the language used for the study of mysticism, and I lay emphasis on finding a new language that avoids the phenomenological assumptions concerning ‘mysticism’ to attend to the particularity of ‘mystic’ traditions, such as that of the Syriac mystic tradition inherited by Barhebraeus.

The volume considers the theories of the passions in Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Particular attention is given to the passion of fear, highlighting how these three writers considered fear as both an individual and a collective affect. Cerrato underlines the characteristics, relevance and usefulness of these affects, together with the strategies of control used to prevent their transformation into passions that can inhibit rational action. He then demonstrates the divergence of views between Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza in terms of how they delineate these conditions. The second part of the volume focuses on analogies concerning rational strategies that a human being can assume in order to manage fear. Together Descartes e Spinoza, it is necessary to recall Hobbes’s Leviathan, since this work is a consistent and relevant source for Spinoza, as far as the conception of fear as a peculiar perception of past and present is concerned.

Although little known, Richard Price’s A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) is one of the most important texts of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Hastings Rasdhall described it “as the best work published on Ethics till quite recent times” because it “contains the gist of the kantian doctrine without Kant’s confusions”; C. D. Broad pointed out in this regard that “until Ross published his book The Right and the Good in 1930” there existed “no statement and defence of what may be called the ‘rationalistic type’ of ethical theory comparable in merit to Price’s”; and W.

In the year 2020, everything we used to think about our habits has been profoundly disrupted. Lockdown still represents an unprecedented experience for all those who went through it, radically affecting our freedom of movement and all those social interactions that used to make up our daily lives. Some people believe that once the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. Others believe that once the virus becomes weaker or a vaccine is at our disposal and the fear is diminished, everything will go back to normal because the mechanism of habit is in many ways similar to the mechanisms of nature, reiterating the uniformity of its functioning. Which is correct? Both positions, perhaps. When philosophers addressed the issue of customs, namely collective habits, they have generally emphasized that caution us required when it comes to changing them - and indeed, if we look back at history… Could pandemics affect shared habits in specific territories, habits that were ultimately generated in reaction to other natural risks and threats?

The current volume brings together a collection of essays from the conference "The Postmodern Condition: Forty Years Later" held at University of Genova on December 2019. Taking advantage of the fortieth anniversay of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard, a book that initiated the cultural explosion of postmodern philosophy, in order to relaunch and further investigate the ongoing debate around the essential meaning of postmodernity, the end of postmodernism and the advent of new aesthetics, philosophy and social "structure of feelings" that have (or tried to) overcome the postmodern paradigm. The book thus brings together two interwoven but often separated themes: on the one hand, the analysis of the vitality, legacy, topicality and historicizing process of postmodernity and postmodernism; on the other, the analysis of the debate around the crisis of the postmodern paradigm and of the advent of new conceptual frameworks, often born out of a direct refusal of postmodern critical discourse and philosophy. Through the filters of different philosophical and aesthetic paradigms, the book thus offers a complex description of contemporary society from the 1980s down to the present moment, dwelling on crucial topics such as the relationship between humanity and technology, the digital revolution, the social role of representations, the dialectics between image and reality, and the vitality of postmodern stylistic features (quotation, metafiction, appropriation etc.).

This book intends to explore the atmospheric issue from an independent, architectural perspective. It is composed of two main sections. The first one introduces and analyzes the atmospheric concept inside the lexical scope of the architectural discipline, mapping the whole taxonomy of semantic declinations that are recognized by architecture, in addition to retracing the etymology of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its evolution. The second section studies the topic throughout the sensory-emotional filter of the perceiving subject located in the built environment, gleaning suggestions from neuroscientific knowledge. More recently, architecture and neuroscience have started to interact, both in the combination of their theories and through experiment-based investigations.

How does culture contribute to healing our planet? Is there anything we should learn from the pandemic? The book answers these questions, exploring the contribution of culture to the protection of the planet, comparing the Italian and the Brazilian contexts, the latter a true thermometer of world trends, from economic and financial to environmental and climatic, social and health. It emerges a reflection on the role of culture as a driving force for the restart and as a bridge to a new normal that awaits us after the pandemic.

In this relatively short book, Johns, in the style of Derrida, looks over the absence or spectre of the signifier “dialectic” in both Martin Heidegger and Graham Harman’s work, arguing that such a negation of the term turns out to be more of an intentional repression than any passive act of neglection. Johns insists that such repression finds its way into their writing as an alternative interpretation of their core concepts altogether. Less a Hegelian critique of such thinkers and more a Heideggerian and Harmanian resuscitation of the dialectic in Hegel as a realist method capable of integration into contemporary philosophy, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the crossroads of contemporary strands of idealism, materialism and realism and the place of the dialectical method today.

One hundred years after the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his oeuvre might best be described as “une pensée”, as a meandering thought-provoking thought, to quote Jean-Luc Godard’s exceptional comment on Pasolini in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Pasolini scholarship has certainly increased in recent years, but mainly from the perspective of Italian Studies and with a particular focus on his poetry, prose and film. The proposed volume instead highlights the interest of his work for the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It therefore compiles key writings by philosophers who are relatively unknown even within the context of contemporary French and Italian thought. By collecting little known or newly translated essays from these philosophers, the volume aims to foster a contemporary discussion about the (in-)actuality of Pasolini’s work.

The tradition of Kant's critical philosophy developed the concept of imagination in a rigorous and productive way. It also allows us to develop an aesthetic approach suitable to explaining and understanding the relationship between sensitivity and technology. In this book, Montani defends the reasons to place this concept in a paleo-anthropological framework, linking it to the imaginative practices that preceded and prepared the advent of articulated discourse. This event involved a profound reorganization of the technical performances that can be traced back to imagination and related internalization processes. Furthermore, the emergence of an articulated language inaugurated a singular story, that of the relationship between word and image. In this study, that story is followed through particular attention to developments in cinema and digital image formats.

The volume tries to offer a comparison between two philosophers who belong to two different philosophical traditions and who have thus been rarely discussed together: Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite these thinkers’ many distinctions, the contributions to the current volume try to reconstruct not only how the ‘second’ Wittgenstein was influenced by the Marxist tradition, but also – and above all – the theoretical affinities between the two philosophers. In this way, the book underlines the potential that Marx’s political thought holds for philosophers of language as well as the social implications of Wittgenstein’s thought and the political potential of some of his central topics, such as his critique of the private language argument and his theory of language games.

The book deals with the complex notion of process worked out by Alfred N. Whitehead, a notion that includes his deep revision of the concepts of time and space. Throughout his whole career, Whitehead emphasized the importance of process for the account of reality. The book discusses Whitehead's concept of process starting from his works in mathematics, logic and epistemology of the natural sciences, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of Whitehead's speculative philosophy. The focus is on the relationship between concrescence and transition, seen as deeply correlated and reciprocally determined. In this perspective, the book offers a reinterpretation of Whitehead's most enigmatic proposal: the event of subjectivity interpreted as a process of subjectivation. This poses the problem of the endurance of subjectivity. The book suggests that this problem is solved by Whitehead through is appropriation of Plato's notion of chora, seen as the "place" of a processual subject.

In 1956, together with his research group, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson published a theory that was to revolutionize the way of conceiving mental illness. Over the years, the central concept of this theory, the double bind, proved effective in an increasing number of fields of knowledge: from the theory of communication to epistemology, from sociology to pedagogy, from literature to philosophy. Through an examination of the inception and development of this concept, the book retraces the main themes, connections and critical points that mark the whole of Bateson’s multifaceted research: from the early ethnographic surveys in New Guinea through to the ecological ideas of his later years, including the cybernetic reflections, his studies of human and animal communication, his work in the psychiatric field. This analysis of the double bind theory, originally formulated as a hypothesis to explain schizophrenia, is not only a guide to the work of one of the most unpredictable and original thinkers of the last century, but also gives access to essential theoretical tools for bringing into focus a number of increasingly persistent contemporary problems.

What can we learn from the way artists live and operate in the world? This is one of the questions that Nietzsche asks himself throughout the course of his work, although it is not one for which he is most famous. In its answer, the question functions as a swinging incessant movement that oscillates between a highly critical analysis of dogmas and prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition and an equally profound recognition of how important it is for each of us to cling to a system of certainties and truths that are but illusions necessary to life. Art speaks to us of this perpetual transit from the brutality of the real to the enchantment of an invented world and teaches us how to move between both extremes. Beyond stereotypes and false myths, the crucial nodes of Nietzsche’s thought are shown in a different light, demonstrating once again the complexity of a philosophy that resists all simplifications.

Revolutionary Gnosticism is a movement common to a great deal of modern and contemporary revolutionary phenomena such as Nazism, Bolshevism and Jacobinism. However no one has studied Salafi- Jihadism yet, the latest existing revolutionary ideology, in gnostic terms. If Salafi-Jihadism were a gnostic phenomenon, it would reveal its Promethean and atheist conception of the world that stands in the forgetfulness of a pure transcendent dimension, notwithstanding the apparently spiritual framework and religious justification that jihadists provide. A similar study, hence, would reveal Salafi-Jihadis’ will of redeeming humankind from Evil (with capital letter) and building the perfect society, leaving God without a clear possibility of intervening in human affairs.

Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American developmental biologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs successfully performed the technique of nuclear transplantation by cloning frog nuclei in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, The Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, and Marie DiBerardino, before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness, and when many thought the very idea of cloning was experimentally impossible. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, Nathan Crowe demonstrates how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems. His book illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as the changing relationship between science and society after the Second World War.