Saggio | Sui “Pastoralia” di Matteo Maria Boiardo

Il saggio di John Butcher si sofferma sulla seconda delle dieci egloghe latine di Matteo Maria Boiardo. Al di là degli spunti biografici all’origine del componimento, l’analisi verte su un esame puntuale della forma testuale e degli artifici retorici ivi adoperati, soprattutto all’interno di un monologo pronunciato dal pastore Titiro. All’indagine più prettamente formale si affianca un discorso parallelo teso a porre in evidenza alcune delle fonti sfruttate nella realizzazione dell’opera. Dall’analisi emerge la figura di un giovane autore già dotato di notevoli capacità retoriche nella composizione del testo poetico e, allo stesso tempo, in grado di attingere a una vasta gamma di letture classiche e moderne.

A sinistra: Matteo Maria Boiardo

Butcher – Sui “Pastoralia” di Matteo Maria Boiardo

Essay | Milton and the Question of Censorship

The essay “Knowledge After the Fall. Milton and the Question of Censorship” by Friederike Schmiga starts from Milton’s short treatise Areopagitica, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England, published in 1644, in which he considers – among other things – the necessity to abolish licensing and thereby political censorship, to explore the theological foundation (as developed in Paradise Lost) of Milton’s conception of human knowledge in the transition from the pre- to the post-lapsarian state. Through this exploration, Schmiga clearly shows how Milton’s polemical intervention against the Licensing Order of 1643 is a powerful and stimulating document of his belief in the theological and political relevance of an open intellectual and poetical space, in which the differentiation of good from evil is the end, not the beginning, of public debate.

Left: Rembrandt van Rijn (circle of), Still life, Books

Schmiga – Knowledge After the Fall. Milton and the Question of Censorship

Essay | The Future of Sustainability

The focus of Ralf Lüfter‘s essay “The Future of Sustainability” does not lie on the analysis of the operative concept of sustainability and its prospects in computed future scenarios. Rather, it is a philosophical enquiry into the meaning of sustainability and its relation to the future, intended as that which comes towards us (namely, towards our being as a humanity) as a concern that awaits our response.

The enquiry involves an interrogation of the concept of time, for which the author refers to Martin Heidegger‘s lecture “Zeit und Sein” and his lecture series “Grundsätze des Denkens”, while a support for clarifying the nature of the claiming concern that comes as the future is found in Immanuel Kant‘s Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral. Because, according to Kant, the claim that addresses us involves a form of accomplishment, the essay ends on a critical reflection on the possibility (or impossibility) of accomplishment in the regime of sustainability.

Left: Paul Klee, Ein Kinderspiel (1939)

Lüfter – The Future of Sustainability

Aufsatz | Ethik, Politik und Dichtung in Pounds “Patria mia”

Ralf Lüfters Aufsatz “Ethik – Politik – Dichtung. Pounds Patria mia” behandelt im Ausgang von Ezra Pounds früher Schrift Patria mia die Frage, was politische Dichtung ist. “Früh” ist diese Schrift nicht in erster Linie, weil sie 1910 vom damals 25-jährigen Dichter verfasst wurde, sondern weil sie die Nähe jener Frühe hält, d.h. des freien unumstößlichen Anfangs, in dessen Anspruch sein Werk im Ganzen steht und aus dem sich der in eigentümlichem Sinn politische Charakter seiner Dichtung bestimmt.

Links: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wrestlers (1913)

Lüfter – Ethik-Politik-Dichtung

Audio Lecture | La frugalità di van Gogh

Pubblichiamo l’audio della conferenza, intitolata “La frugalità di van Gogh”, che Gino Zaccaria ha tenuto all’Università di Bolzano, il 28 Novembre 2014, in occasione del convegno “Economia ospitale”. La conferenza tenta una puntua-lizzazione dell’essenza dell’arte, avvalendosi di riferimenti ad alcune lettere del ricco epistotalario del pittore.

Il testo della conferenza è pubblicato nel volume La provenienza dell’arte. Atena e l’enigma.

A sinistra: Vincent van Gogh, Campo di frumento al tramonto (Arles, Giugno 1888)

Zaccaria — La frugalità di van Gogh

Essay | Eliot’s perception of man, culture and economics

Jeroen Vanheste‘s essay first explores T. S. Eliot’s “classicist” approach to culture and his religiosity as elements of a unitary European cultural heritage. The essay then goes on to discuss the poet’s views on human reason and personhood, which implies an element of moral responsibility. Vanheste argues that Eliot’s ethical conception of culture as “a whole way of life” establishes a constitutive link between art and literature on the one hand and politics, economics, education and science on the other. One of the consequences of that link is an ethically based notion of economics. — The present text will be part of the second volume of the book series Elementa œconomica, dedicated to the theme of “hospitable economics”, which will be published in 2016.

Left: Adalbert Stifter, Die Heiterkeit. Griechische Tempelruinen [2] (around 1860)

Vanheste – Hollow Men in a waste Land

Essay | Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus

Bogdan Minca‘s essay “Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Platonic Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (1931/32) as an Early Indication of Kehre and Ereignis” focuses on the lecture course The Essence of Truth, published as volume 34 of the Gesamtausgabe. The author interprets this text as the earliest document of a fundamental hermeneutical shift in Heidegger’s way of reading the thinkers of our tradition. This shift, in turn, coincides with the elaboration of the thinking of Ereignis that is first stated, in an extensive manner, in Beiträge zur Philosophie. However, the ground for that thinking, Minca suggests, is in fact prepared in the lecture course on Plato, which, as a consequence, can be considered as “a tacit elaboration of Ereignis with the help of Platonic thinking.”

Left: Athena and Heracles on an Attic red-figure kylix, 480–470 BC

Minca – Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Platonic Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (1931/32) as an Early Indication of Kehre and Ereignis

Kurz-Essays | Die Innovation und ihre Räume

Die hier veröffentlichten Texte thematisieren zwei unterschiedliche, jedoch verwandte, weil unsere Epoche auszeichnende Phänomene. Die Skizze von Jürgen Gedinat handelt von der systematischen Innovation (in ihrem dynamisierenden Grundzug) und der damit verbundenen Idee der Nachhaltigkeit bzw. der nachhaltigen Entwicklung. Der Kurzvortrag von Ivo De Gennaro spricht, in einem ihrer Namen (nämlich “Europaregion” bzw. “Euregio”), die Art der Räumlichkeit an, die die Innovation – und das heißt die moderne Technik – für sich einrichtet.

Links: Albrecht Dürer, Käuzchen (1508)

De Gennaro – Entgrenzung

Gedinat – Systematische Innovation