Being and Its Surroundings Vattimo, Gianni; Iannantuono, Giuseppe; Martinengo, Alberto ...
2021, 2021-08-15
eBook
Gianni Vattimo, one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers and most famously associated with the concept of weak thought, explores theoretical and practical issues flowing from his ...fundamental rejection of the traditional Western understanding of Being as an absolute, unchanging, and transcendent reality. The essays in this book move within the surroundings of Being without constructing a systematic, definitive analysis of the topic.
Contrary to the typical trend of contemporary art, according to which the invention matters more than the material execution, Nespolo’s artistic practice is characterized by a primacy of the mastery ...of manual working. Nespolo’s poetic is not the mere affirmation of his ironic attitude but rather a kind of postmodern liberation based on the recovery of visual forms, including traditional ones. His artworks exhibit an affectionate attitude toward things. Through this attitude artwork becomes a way, not tragic and neither pathetic, of living the experience of mortality.
Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal ...of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.
Of reality Vattimo, Gianni; Valgenti, Robert T
2016, 2016., 2016-03-15
eBook
A defense of the critical faculties that keep us from settling for the status quo. Drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo develops a philosophy to combat the newest enemy of freedom and ...democracy: complacency toward reality. Resistance to reality becomes our best hope for countering the ongoing indifference to our fate.
A farewell to truth Vattimo, Gianni; McCuaig, William
2011, 2011., 20110325, 2011-04-05, 20110101
eBook
With Western cultures becoming more pluralistic, the question of "truth" in politics has become a game of interpretations. Today, we face the demise of the very idea of truth as an objective ...description of facts, though many have yet to acknowledge that this is changing. Gianni Vattimo explicitly engages with the important consequences for democracy of our changing conception of politics and truth, such as a growing reluctance to ground politics in science, economics, and technology. Yet in Vattimo's conception, a farewell to truth can benefit democracy, exposing the unspoken issues that underlie all objective claims. The end of absolute truth challenges the legitimacy of policies based on perceived objective necessitiesprotecting the free market, for example, even if it devastates certain groups or classes. Vattimo calls for a truth that is constructed with consensus and a respect for the liberty of all. By taking into account the cultural paradigms of others, a more "truthful" societyfreer and more democraticbecomes possible. In this book, Vattimo continues his reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of charity and hope, freeing society from authoritarian, metaphysical dogmatism. He also extends Nietzsche's "death of God" to the death of an authoritarian God, ushering in a new, postreligious Christianity. He connects the thought of Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Karl Popper with surprising results and accommodates modern science more than in his previous work, reconciling its validity with an insistence that knowledge is interpretive. Vattimo's philosophy justifies Western nihilism in its capacity to dispense with absolute truths. Ranging over politics, ethics, religion, and the history of philosophy, his reflections contribute deeply to a modern reconception of God, metaphysics, and the purpose of reality.
This book describes the reception of the Nietzschean Death of God within the Italian philosophical debate, an ambit traditionally concerned with emphasising the practical-political meaning of ...philosophical thinking. Nietzsche's abyssal announcement of the Death of God - "mein Wort für Ideale" - highlights the necessity to rethink the connection between theory and praxis. This is particularly evident in the works of Italian thinkers such as Vattimo, Cacciari, Colli, Masini e Severino, who in large part have read Nietzsche's philosophy through the philosophical filter of Marxian culture, trying to show the emancipatory charge present in Nietzsche's work and the necessity to rethink the boundaries of the political, over the limits of political theology. Emilio Carlo Corriero demonstrates how the reception of Nietzsche's pronouncement, with its theoretical consequences, reveals the specific character of Italian philosophy, its eclectic attitude and its attention to the practical-political meaning of philosophical thought, but also its constant reflection on the concept of history and the origin of Being.
How to Weaken the EU Frame Zabala, Santiago; Vattimo, Gianni
Identities,
2015, 2015-01-01, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Even though the European Union was created to avoid new wars within the continent and promote
social integration, it has never questioned its political horizon. This is why legal scholars are ...continuously reminding us that until our constitution is ratified, the Union will continue to lack the political debate that is at the center of any mature democracy. But if the Union has now reached a new record of unpopularity it is because of this general neutering of politics, which allows technocrats to prevail over politicians and indifference over democracy. The logic behind our thesis is not that countries cannot leave the Union but that doing so would create more harm than staying. However, this does not imply there is no alternative; quite the contrary, a profound resistance to the Union has not only been discussed but also practiced throughout Europe.
Over the course of his career, Gianni Vattimo has assumed a number of public and private identities and has pursued multiple intellectual paths. He seems to embody several contradictions, at once ...defending and questioning religion and critiquing and serving the state. Yet the diversity of his life and thought form the very essence of, as he sees it, the vocation and responsibility of the philosopher. In a world that desires quantifiable results and ideological expediency, the philosopher becomes the vital interpreter of the endlessly complex.
As he outlines his ideas about the philosopher's role, Vattimo builds an important companion to his life's work. He confronts questions of science, religion, logic, literature, and truth, and passionately defends the power of hermeneutics to engage with life's conundrums. Vattimo conjures a clear vision of philosophy as something separate from the sciences and the humanities but also intimately connected to their processes, and he explicates a conception of truth that emphasizes fidelity and participation through dialogue.
Not being God Vattimo, Gianni; Paterlini, Piergiorgio; McCuaig, William
2009, 2010., 20090526, 2009-07-06
eBook
Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being ...finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy. Turin, the city where he was born and one of the intellectual capitals of Europe (also the city in which Nietzsche went mad), forms the core of his reminiscences, enhanced by fascinating vignettes of studying under Hans Georg Gadamer, teaching in the United States, serving as a public intellectual and interlocutor of Habermas and Derrida, and working within the European Parliament to unite Europe.
Vattimo's status as a left-wing faculty president paradoxically made him a target of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, causing him to flee Turin for his life. Left-wing terrorism did not deter the philosopher from his quest for social progress, however, and in the 1980s, he introduced a daring formulation called "weak thought," which stripped metaphysics, science, religion, and all other absolute systems of their authority. Vattimo then became notorious both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity (he was trained as a Catholic intellectual) and for the Vatican's denunciation of his views.
Paterlini weaves his interviews with Vattimo into an utterly candid first-person portrait, creating a riveting text that is destined to become one of the most compelling accounts of homosexuality, history, politics, and philosophical invention in the twentieth century.
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