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Living in a province dominated by powerful oligarchs, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) concluded that political philosophy should work to undermine aristocratic authority and prevent political devolution into feudalism. Rejecting the possibility that the free market could successfully instill civil behavior, he advocated for a strong central judicial system to work closely with citizens to promote stability and justice. This study puts Vico in conversation with other Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Mandeville to show how his alternative warrants serious consideration. In contrast to scholars who read Vico's New Science as a defense of the imagination, this study casts his account of poetic wisdom politically as an epistemological critique of the aristocratic mentality. Myth and Authority argues that Vico's depiction of pagan religion is a refined attempt to explain how oligarchy maintains its stranglehold on power. While Western civilization did not follow the path Vico suggested, it may now be more relevant as concerns grow about the increasing influence of the wealthy on civil institutions.
One of Europe's leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito's political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito's reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito's philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns.
Italy has a rich philosophical legacy, and recent developments and movements in its political philosophy have produced a significant body of thought by internationally renowned philosophers working on questions and themes such as the critique of neoliberalism, statehood, politics and culture, feminism, community, the stranger, and the relationship between politics and action. This volume brings this conversation to English-language readers, considering well-known Italian philosophers such as Vattimo, Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, as well as philosophers with whom English-language readers are less acquainted, such as Luce Fabbri, Adriana Cavarero, and Lea Melandri. In addition, the essays extend the conversation beyond the realm of Italian philosophy, bringing its thinkers into dialogue with philosophical figures including Badiou, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano.
A new introduction to Rousseau, guiding the student through the key concepts of his work by examining the overall development of his ideas.
This collection brings together perspectives on the interplay of communication, dialogue, and responsibility, exploring communicative acts of disruption toward a social environment attuned to short-sighted individualism. Semioethics highlights the condition of inevitable entanglement with the other at the origin of sociality, which demands a response to the other based on listening and accountability. The volume introduces readers to the theoretical foundations of semioethics, an emergent direction within sign and language studies which relies upon a commitment to otherness, unindifference, and dialogue. Building on the dialogic approaches of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas, chapters, g...
This book is a retrospective view of modern philosophical anthropology through the works of two of its greatest exponents. the author demonstrates how mythology, the philosophy of history and language and Vico's concept of man had as a constant referral point Malebranche's psychology with its Cartesian formulation. The idolatrous and mythopoietic imagination that is described in La Scienza Nuova (New Science) has much in common with the "pagan" mind (that is to say the mind subjugated to passions, sensitivity and fantasy that is described in La Recherche (The Search after Truth). Some of the themes discussed here are myth, the metaphoric nature of thought, idolatry, the formation of mentalit...
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