Un siglo, una década y un año de Carlo Michelstaedter.

Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia, 1887-1910) left a singular trail in the Italian philosophy of the early 20th century. Almost one hundred and eleven years after his demise, his suicide, one can still discuss the influence of the Italian thinker, the vitality of their topics and the depth of their thinking. Our purpose is to know the figure that subsists behind the thinker of Persuasion and Rhetoric. In accordance with this objective, we will make a tour of his philosophical, epistolary and poetic work, which is certainly not enough. However, it will help us to shed light on the fas-cinating creation of the last doctor of nihilism, the last great diagnosis of the profound lack of sense that carried the second part of the S. XIX and inaugurated the first decade of the S. XX. In the form of an elegy, perhaps even an ode, we will remember the Italian philosopher in these times, for he remains a fruitful, unfinished and extremely mysterious undertaking. In conclusion, we will try to defend Michelstaedter from merely suicidal readings and approach a four-time interpretation of the Italian philosopher.

Karl-Otto Apel

Karl-Otto Apel (b. 1922–d. 2017) was one of the most original, influential, and renowned German philosophers of the post–World War II generation. He is credited with what is known as the linguistification of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in general, and the linguistic transformation of philosophy in Germany, in particular. His name is closely associated with that of Jürgen Habermas, his junior colleague, whom he met as a graduate student in Bonn in the 1950s, and with whom he maintained a lengthy philosophical collaboration. He received his doctorate in 1950 with a dissertation titled Dasein und Erkennen: Eine erkenntnistheoretische Interpretation der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (translated as: “Dasein and knowledge: An epistemological interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy”). However, as early as the 1950s, Apel had become increasingly critical of the relativistic and historicist consequences of his phenomenological and hermeneutical work. In 1962, he presented his Habilitation at the University of Mainz, which was published in 1963 as Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (translated as: “The idea of language in the traditions of humanism from Dante to Vico”). This book is a pioneering reconstruction of the Italian philosophy of language and how it laid the foundations for the different currents of the philosophy of language that would branch out in the modern philosophies of language. In 1965, Apel published “Die Entfaltung der ‘sprachanalytischen’ Philosophie und das Problem der ‘Geisteswissenchaften,’” which was translated into English as Analytic Philosophy of Language and the “Geisteswissenschaften” in 1967. This was the first work of Apel to be translated into English, but it is also emblematic of Apel’s pioneering engagement with “analytic” philosophy. In 1973, at the urging of Habermas, Apel published Transformation der Philosophie (Transformation of philosophy) in two volumes. A selection, mostly from the second volume, appeared in 1983 under the title Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. In this work Apel introduced the idea that would become the hallmark of his thinking: The Apriori of the Community of Communication, by which he meant that the conditions of possibility of all knowledge and interaction are already given in every natural language that belongs to a community of speakers, who are per force already entangled in normative relations, that can never be circumvented or negated lest one commit a performative self-contradiction. In 1975, Apel published Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce: Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus (The intellectual path of Charles S. Peirce: An introduction to American pragmatism), which is made up of the lengthy introduction he had written for his two-volume German selection and translation of Peirce’s writings. His next most important book was Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (translated as: “Discourse and responsibility: The problem of the transition to a postconventional morality”), from 1988, a collection of essays in which Apel develops his own version of discourse ethics. Apel’s last three books are collections of essays: Auseinandersetzungen in Erprobung des transzendentalpragmatischen Ansatzes (1998) [Confrontations: Testing the transcendental-pragmatic proposal) (It should be noted that Auseinandersetzungen, one of Apel’s favorite words, could also be translated as “coming to terms” with a particular thinker. This is an important volume as in three extensive essays Apel discusses his differences with and departures from Habermas’s version of universal pragamatics.); Paradigmen der Ersten Philosophie: Zur reflexiven–transzendentalpragmatischen Rekonstruktion der Philosophiegeschichte (2011) (translated as: “Paradigms of first philosophy: Toward a reflexive-transcendental-pragmatic reconstruction of the history of philosophy”), and Transzendentale Reflexion und Geschichte (2017) (translated as: Transcendental reflection and history”).

[Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Augusto Del Noce as a Critic of Postulatory Atheism

In this article I seek to clarify the relation between the ideas of modernity and secularization in the thought of Augusto Del Noce, thus countering the argument that he is the ‘enemy’ of modernity and secularization. Contextualizing Del Noce’s place within the wider reflection of the problem of secularization in the 20th century European and Italian philosophy, I argue that his position on modernity and secularization cannot be squeezed into the bipolar ‘modern’ vs. ‘antimodern’ opposition, as stated by some of his critiques. I conclude that Del Noce should be regarded not as the ‘enemy’ of modernity or secularization but rather as the critic of postulatory atheism that presents itself as the inevitable outcome of the modern historical process.