Acta Philosophica

Nietzsche and the aristocrats of work

Giorgio Faro — 2024-09-20

This essay aims to dwell on the peculiar conception of artistic work in Nietzsche, the only work that Nietzsche appreciated, in the youthful phase of his works (up to Human, Too Human), for the saving role of aesthetics (especially music), which is meant to conceal the tragic aspect of reality. After the disappointment caused by the ‘Wagner case’, there will be an Enlightenment phase, in which science will seem to take the place of artistic work. However, by Thus I Speak Zarathustra, the mature Nietzsche will once again return to consider aesthetic enjoyment as man’s only salvation against the tragic pessimism that reality incites, considering even science an illusion. There will be no shortage of comparisons with Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with Marx, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, van Gogh and a final review of Nietzsche’s proposal.

Language of Love in Aquinas’ Theory of the Passions

Ryosuke Matsumura — 2024-09-20

In the treatise on the passions of the Summa Theologiae (I-II.22-48), Aquinas speaks of love under an intriguing variety of terms, such as connaturalitas, complacentia, consonantia, coaptatio, aptitudo, proportio, and inclinatio. This terminology has been an issue since the early stages of studies related to Aquinas’ theory of love. Yet, while much attention has been focused on the transition of these terms from the Commentary on the Sentences to the Summa Theologiae, there are only few studies concerned with the reason why Aquinas uses this terminology to express love. This study shows that Aquinas was aware of the poverty of ordinary language and therefore felt the need to employ multiple terms in order to express the passion of love as adequately as possible.

Natural Filiation as a Feature of the Human Person in the Philosophical Thought of Leonardo Polo

Priscila S. Guerra Lamadrid — 2024-09-20

In this study we will look at Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo’s anthropological exposition of the fundamental nature of natural filiation within the discovery of the human person, especially regarding the search for the Origin and the Addressee. These questions reflect the elements which are found in this author’s proposal concerning the discovery of the personal transcendentals.

Theory and Practice of Insight in R. W. Emerson

Alessandro Lattuada — 2024-09-20

The concept of insight has been the subject of significant debate in modern and contemporary philosophy, crossing both the European and American traditions; just think of Bergson and the American current of radical empiricism. The aim of this article is to add a precious piece to this debate, investigating the meaning of insight in R. W. Emerson, whose thought is at the origin of American pragmatism and of great importance for European philosophy. The concepts of Nature and Sympathy characterize philosophical insight not only from the theoretical and gnoseological point of view, but also from the practical one; applying the method of insight also to the ethical and political sphere, Emerson’s metaphysics of insight elaborates the traits of an ideal society, sympathetically or intuitively inspired by the order of Nature, that is, the ontogenetic common background of man and reality

The Ontology of AI - An Aristotelian Analysis

Ricardo F. Crespo — 2024-09-20

The aim of this paper is to examine the ontological nature of AI based on Aristotle’s metaphysical categories. It first provides a brief introduction to these categories and applies them specifically to artifacts, including AI. Next, it investigates whether an artifact like AI can actually think. To that end, it presents Aristotle’s understanding of thinking and concludes that, while AI can perform certain intellectual activities, it cannot attain an abstractive intuition of essences and causes. Consequently, AI is ‘nominalist’ and falls within a nominalist approach to ontology. The paper explores the implications of this perspective for AI’s ability to pursue the truth, as well as the corresponding notion of AI’s freedom.

The Image of the World and Metaphysical Idolatry

Sandro Gorgone — 2024-09-20

The aim of this paper is to outline one of the perspectives according to which the relationship between subject and world can be declined in modernity, starting from the centrality that the concept of Weltanschauung assumed in the first half of the last century. The hermeneutic lens through which the subject-image-world nexus is investigated is the Heideggerian conception of the transcendental subject and of the connected objectification of the world, which is fully expressed in the famous 1938 lecture Das Zeitalter des Weltbildes. The aim here is an idolatrous interpretation of the Weltbild as opposed to a possible iconic interpretation of Heideggerian thought of being; for this reading I will use the phenomenological understanding of these two theological figures ‒ the idol and the icon ‒ first offered by Jean-Luc Marion in his 1977 text The Idol and Distance.

The Relevance of Classical Metaphysics: Presentation

Francesco Saccardi — 2024-09-20

The Relevance of Classical Metaphysics

Francesco Saccardi (ed.)

Francesco Saccardi, Presentation

Gian Pietro Soliani, Critique of Metaphysics as a Disarticulation of Transcendentality. A Philosophical Analysis of Jean-Luc Marion’s Thought

Francesco Saccardi, Classical Metaphysics and the Senses of Being. ‘Analytical Thomism’ in the Face of Logical Quantification

Dario Sacchi, Reality, Existence, Possible Worlds

Paolo Pagani, Necessity de dicto and de re Starting with Alvin Plantinga

The Critique of Metaphysics as a Disarticulation of Transcendentality

Gian Pietro Soliani — 2024-09-20

The article provides a philosophical analysis of Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of metaphysics, understood according to the concept of onto-theology. In the first part, the way in which Marion separates the being of metaphysics from the Divine being, refusing the doctrine of the convertibility between ‘being’ and ‘good’, is analysed. In the second part, I criticise Marion’s claims on the finite nature of human thought. This claim is a rejection of the transcendental character of thought, whose horizon is reduced to that of the imagination. Finally, I emphasised that Marion’s concept of donation is a supertranscendental concept, placed beyond ‘being’, ‘thought’ and the principle of non-contradiction, whose validity is reduced to the ontic domain, denying de facto its transcendentality. Marion’s thought is thus one of the most relevant contemporary attempts to reject the transcendental, understood as what cannot be transcended, but ends up replacing it with a surrogate.

Classical Metaphysics and the senses of Being

Francesco Saccardi — 2024-09-20

The article aims to analyse the question of Being, in its meaning of ‘existence’, in relation to the theory of logical quantification. Some authors are considered who believe that the realist imprint of Fregean philosophy can make a decisive contribution to the clarification of classical, and especially Thomistic, doctrine on the different meanings of the verb ‘to be’. The use of the existential quantifier would thus be one – and not the only – of the meanings that belong to ‘is’, understood as 'to exist', and would moreover be a meaning derived from actual existence, in analogy to the way in which esse ut verum is founded on actus essendi. However, this conception is based on a theory of knowledge that suffers from a gnoseologistic, and ultimately naturalistic, presupposition. By recovering a correct ‘logic of presence’, it is possible to show how the difficulties encountered by the theory of logical quantification can be traced back to the failure to thematise a certain 'ontological difference' between Being and entity.

Reality, Existence, Possible Worlds

Dario Sacchi — 2024-09-20

Hitherto metaphysics has usually relied upon the same concept of reality that prevails within common sense and natural science, i. e. being a possible object of sensible experience: but according to the rules of logic such a concept is incompatible with the assertion and even the assumption of a supersensible reality. However, we have no reason to consent to it because it derives from an undue absolutization of the pragmatic criterion according to which my actual body is given a pre-eminence over my dreamed or imagined bodies and my real world is given a pre-eminence over all those Leibnizian possible worlds that some analytical philosophers rightly consider to be as real as our real world. In fact, a correct ontology must admit the ultimate identity of possibility and reality; as for the existence of God, it is to be proved a priori, on the model of St. Anselm’s argument, not a posteriori.

Necessity de dicto and de re starting with Alvin Plantinga

Paolo Pagani — 2024-09-20

This contribution aims to enhance one aspect of Alvin Plantinga's thought: the recovery of the classical distinction between de dicto and de re necessity. Plantinga makes this recovery to show that de re necessity is not reducible to de dicto necessity. By this, he intends to defend the reasons for essentialism. For our part, we will illustrate this author's debt to the classical tradition (Aristotle, Boethius, Thomas), his relation to the debate contemporary to him, but especially the relevance of this distinction. Indeed, it turns out to be decisive in avoiding those fallacies that – in various ways – have tried to justify necessitarianism.

Roger Pouivet, La cohabitation de religions. Pourquoi est-elle si difficile?, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 2024, pp. 128

Roberto Di Ceglie — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702013

Ramón Lucas Lucas, Temporale eterno, Edizioni Art, Roma 2023, pp. 312

Francesco Russo — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702013

Paolo Zellini, Il Teorema di Pitagora, Adelphi Edizioni, Milano 2023, pp. 158

Giovanni Citrigno — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702013

Pierpaolo Donati, Alterità. Sul confine fra l’Io e l’altro, Città Nuova, Roma 2023, pp. 272

Antonio Malo — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012

Paolo Livieri, Metafisica dell’esistenza. La rivelazione della realtà in F. H. Jacobi, («Rationes»), Padova University Press, Padova 2023, pp. 182

Tommaso Mauri — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012

José l. Villacañas, Ortega y Gasset. Una experiencia filosófica española, Guillermo Escolar, Madrid 2023, pp. 1193.

Francisco Javier Calvo Tolosa — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012

Giulia Lombardi, A scuola da Aristotele leggendo Platone. Su techne, sophia e vita del genere umano, prefazione di Vittorino Grossi, postfazione di Dominique Lambert, Studium, Roma 2022, pp. 208

Michele Alessandrelli — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012

Platone, Timeo, a cura di Federico M. Petrucci, introduzione di Franco Ferrari, Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Milano 2022, pp. CCXXIV+500.

Giovanni Citrigno — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012

Jorge Martín Montoya Camacho, José Manuel Giménez Amaya, Encubrimiento y verdad. Algunos rasgos diagnósticos de la sociedad actual, EUNSA, Pamplona 2021, pp. 348

Eloy Villanueva Cruz — 2024-09-20

DOI:10.19272/202400702012