PhD Classess and Workshops 2024-25

______ ______ ______ PHD CLASSES ______ ______ ______
2024-25

FRANCESCO FRONTEROTTA

What is Aristoteles' Metaphysics? First Philosophy between Archeology, Ontology, Ousiology and Theology

Aristotle provides, in the different books of his Metaphysics, a series of indications on the object of the discipline

which he proposes to investigate and which he calls ‘first philosophy’ or simply σοφία. Such indications do not

always appear coherent, because they lead one to place as the object of investigation, from time to time, the causes and the first principles of all things, being qua being, the substance or the most eminent divine entity. The course will proceed to examine this difficulty, also confronting the later exegetical tradition.

7 february 2025, 10-12 seminar room

13 february 2025, 10-12 seminar room

20 february 2025, 10-12 seminar room

27 february 2025, 10-12 seminar room

ELEONORA PIROMALLI

The Evolution of Critical Theory: From the Origins of the Frankfurt School to the Present

This lecture series traces the evolution of the Frankfurt School through its four generations, examining how each has revisited and reinterpreted key themes in normative critique, conceptions of reason, and theories of human action. At the heart of the first generation of Frankfurt critical theorists lies a reflection on reason – whether emancipatory or instrumental – situated within a heterodox Marxist framework. We will begin with foundational works from the 1930s and 1940s by Max Horkheimer, followed by an analysis of the complex relationship between myth and enlightenment that Horkheimer and Adorno address in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The second session explores Jürgen Habermas’s communicative turn, which redefines normative critique through his theory of communicative action. Here, reason is reconceptualized as a dialogical and collective practice, one that underpins democratic and emancipatory processes. The third session will focus on the third generation, primarily represented by Axel Honneth, who emphasizes the struggle for recognition as a central force in social conflict and emancipation. Finally, we will examine contributions from the fourth and most recent generation of critical theorists, focusing on scholars like Rahel Jaeggi and Hartmut Rosa.

Horkheimer, Adorno, and the Intersection of Myth and Enlightenment: Monday 3-02-2025, 10:00-12:00, seminar room

Jürgen Habermas and the Communicative Turn: Wednesday 5-02-2025, 10:00-12:00, seminar room

Axel Honneth and the Struggle for Recognition: Monday 10-02-2025, 10:00-12:00, seminar room

Hartmut Rosa and Rahel Jaeggi: Critique of Alienation and "Forms of Life": Wednesday 12-02-2025, 10:00-12:00, seminar room

FILOMENA DIODATO

Language and Mental Representation in the Perspective of Cognitive Semiotics

This module explores the relationship between language and mental representation through the lens of cognitive semiotics. The first lecture will introduce two foundational anti-psychologistic approaches in 20th-century philosophy of language: the Fregean and Saussurean perspectives. In examining ‘representation,’ we will trace the complex development that has led to a clear division between internalist and externalist semantics: the former presupposes a robust concept of mental representation, increasingly computational, while the latter adopts a weaker version or omits it altogether. The second lecture will survey the principal areas of inquiry in cognitive semiotics, a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary field that seeks to elucidate meaning-making processes in both humans and non-humans. Cognitive semiotics is thus positioned as particularly conducive to bridging the gap between “internalism” and “externalism.” Finally, the third and fourth lectures will propose a potential integration of phenomenologically oriented cognitive semiotics from the “Lund school” with the “Roman school” approach as developed by Tullio De Mauro.

Schedule:

Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 2-4 PM

Wednesday, March 19, 2025, 2-4 PM

Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 2-4 PM

Wednesday, April 9, 2025, 2-4 PM

MARCELLO MUSTÈ

The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci: philological and theoretical issues

The seminar offers a general introduction to the study of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks through a preliminary discussion of the history of the editions, the main philological issues of the manuscript, and the criteria underlying the new National Edition of his writings. In subsequent discussions, several thematic issues of Gramsci's thought will be examined: the conception of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis, the interpretation of the cycle of bourgeois revolutions as passive revolutions, the analysis of the world of the 1930s, and the problem of Americanism and Fordism.

Class Schedule:
- Philology and chronology in the reconstruction of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
- Marxism as a philosophy of praxis
- The theory of passive revolutions
- Americanism and fordism

______ ______ ______ WORKSHOPS ______ ______ ______
2024-25

Workshop: PHILOSOPHIES OF LANGUAGE. THEORIES AND HISTORY
faculty sponsor: Marina De Palo, Filomena Diodato
students coordinators: Claudia Cicerchia, Sara Dellino, Francesco Verde
title: Philosophies of Language Today. Issues and Authors.
This seminar rests on the cooperation between the doctoral school in philosophy and the LabSIL (https://web.uniroma1.it/storiaideelinguistiche/) of La Sapienza. There is a long and important tradition of studies about theories of language and their history, represented by scholars such as Antonino Pagliaro, founder of the Roman school of linguistics, his pupils Walter Belardi, and Tullio De Mauro and as Lia Formigari, who have carried a large part of their research at the university La Sapienza. Labsil is now a meeting place for younger and older scholars concerned by this issue. The specific branch of philosophy of language carried out by the LabSIL intertwines theoretical and philosophical reflections on language with the history of linguistic theories and with philological attention to texts (philologeîn and philosopheîn). This intertwinement shows the epistemological value of a philosophy of linguistics built on the history of theories. According to this tradition, the aim of the seminar is to bring together different disciplines and skills, first and foremost those of philosophers, historians, philosophers of science and linguists.
Workshop schedule:

·      11/12/2024 – Aula XIII
Presentazione della traduzione delle Ricerche filosofiche, a cura di Luigi Perissinotto, Feltrinelli, 2024.
Modera Marina De Palo, intervengono Piergiorgio Donatelli e Marco Mazzeo.

·      13/03/2025 – Aula Seminari
Coscienza e linguaggio. A partire da Phénoménologies et théories du langage autour de Merleau-Ponty, 2023.
Simone Aurora (Università degli Studi di Padova) e Marina De Palo (Sapienza Università di Roma).
Modera Filomena Diodato, discussant Edoardo Moré.

·      07/05/2025 – Aula Seminari
Des fonctions positives du langage intérieure, entre intelligence naturelle et intelligence artificielle.
Stéphanie Smadja (Université Toulouse-II).
Modera Marina De Palo, discussant Francesco Verde.

·      22/05/2025 – Aula Seminari
Enactive Cognitive Semiotics.
Elena Cuffari (Franklin & Marshall College).
Modera Filomena Diodato, discussant Claudia Cicerchia.

·      4/06/2025 – Aula Seminari
Gli assenti. La lingua di chi non c'è.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University).
Modera Marco Mazzeo, discussant Sara Dellino.

All the lectures will take place at 5pm

Seminario permanente di: STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA

Docente responsabile: Francesco Fronterotta

Dottorandi responsabili: Livia Blundo, Anna L. Bucarelli, Benedetta Catoni, Mattia Fiorilli, Vincenzo Fusco

Titolo: Metafisica si dice in molti sensi. Figure storiche di una scienza anonima

Giovedì 9 gennaio 2025

15.00 – 18.00

Aula II

Francesco Verde (Sapienza Univ. di Roma), Perduto e poi ritrovato? La storia del corpus aristotelico tra III e I sec. a.C.

Francesco Fronterotta (Sapienza Univ. di Roma), La Metafisica di Aristotele, il titolo meta ta physika e il concetto di «metafisica»

Giovedì 16 gennaio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Christoph Helmig (Univ. di Colonia), Is Plato’s Parmenides a Metaphysics avant la lettre? Metaphysics as theology in later Neoplatonism

Massimiliano Lenzi (Sapienza Univ. di Roma), Esemplarismo, analogia, teofania. L’essere creaturale nella metafisica cristiana di Tommaso d’Aquino

Giovedì 23 gennaio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Amos Bertolacci (IMT Lucca), Metafisica si dice in moltissimi sensi: il caso della tradizione araba

Giovanni Licata (Sapienza Univ. di Roma), La pericolosità della metafisica in Averroè e Maimonide

Giovedì 30 gennaio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Francesco Marrone (Univ. di Bari Aldo Moro), L’ontologia come scienza trascendentale. Il caso Clauberg

Alice Ragni (A. v. Humboldt – Univ. di Münster), Anche philosophia prima si dice in molti sensi: una rassegna nella prima età moderna

Giovedì 6 febbraio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Claudio Buccolini (Iliesi CNR Roma), «numquam certis indiciis vigiliam a somno posse distingui». Metafisica e sogno: una discussione all'Accademia di Berlino (1762)

Francesco V. Tommasi (Sapienza Univ. di Roma), La storia come filosofia prima. Un percorso nella fenomenologia

Giovedì 13 febbraio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Igor Agostini (Univ. del Salento), La conoscenza della sostanza dalla Scolastica a Descartes

Gualtiero Lorini (Univ. di Verona), A.G. Baumgarten e l’unità della metafisica fra estetica e morale

Giovedì 20 febbraio 2025

15.00-18.00

Aula II

Pina Totaro (Iliesi CNR Roma), Vita e morte nella filosofia di Spinoza e nella storia dello Spinozismo

Emanuele Mariani (Univ. di Bologna), La visione organica del mondo di F.A. Trendelenburg. Essere, linguaggio, pensiero e movimento

Giovedì 27 febbraio 2025

15.00-17.00

Aula II

Andreas Speer (Thomas Institut – Univ. di Colonia), The fragile convergence. Structures of metaphysical thinking

Workshop: THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY
faculty sponsors: Donatella Di Cesare, Elettra Stiimilli
Students coordinators: Leonardo Arigone, Andrea Bianchi, Anna Fantoni, Sajjad Lohi, Silvia Lorusso e Ludovica Picchi
Title: Philosophical Voices on Fascism

What does “fascism” mean in the 21st century? Reconstructing historical memory from the perspective of philosophy implies not only a confrontation with the years between the two world wars, a bleak past of violence, dictatorships, and racism; but it also means confronting what resurfaces spontaneously in the face of the current rise of radical right-wingers, the proliferation of populism, and xenophobia. Beyond some similarities, this set of phenomena has important differences with historical fascism, which philosophy has the task of bringing to light. There are those who suggest using the notion of “post fascism” in reference to what is happening: no longer fascism, but neither something completely new and different. In order to define this set of transient, heterogeneous, still mobile experiences, poised between a past that is concluded, but still alive in collective memory, and a future that is absolutely uncertain, the Permanent Seminar of Theoretical Philosophy proposes to analyze the most pressing issues on the topic through a discussion with some authoritative “philosophical voices on fascism.”

Workshop schedule:

6 marzo 2025       Roberto Esposito (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
13 marzo 2025     Enzo Traverso (Cornell University, Ithaca, US)
20 marzo 2025      Sigrid Weigel (ZfL Berlin)
27 marzo 2025      Luciano Canfora
3 aprile 2025          Fabio Frosini (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo)

Workshop: DA'AT: MEMORY, HISTORY AND JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
faculty sponsors: Chiara Adorisio, Giovanni Licata, Orietta Ombrosi
Students coordinators: Gabriele Venticinque

With da'at, which in Hebrew means ‘knowledge’, we propose to create a connection between research paths that are similar, though different, in the direction of the knowledge of Judaism in its different cultural expressions, whether historical-philosophical, philosophical-moral, historical or even artistic-literary, and to deepen, through a collegial proposal, its profound, though little known, cultural heritage. The aim will therefore be to bring philosophy into dialogue with fields of scientific investigation that help to understand its meaning and origins.
The seminar will therefore explore the way in which Judaism has contributed to the development of philosophy from the Middle Ages up to the modern and secularised, post-modern and contemporary epoches. The seminar will explore both the philosophical and the historico-philosophical perspectives, analysing the dialogue with the cultures with which Judaism has come into productive contact (Arab-Islamic and Christian-Latin worlds). The seminar will make use of the internal and specific resources of the Philosophy Department but will also call upon an important dialogue with a more international and already well-established dimension. Since there has long been a great interest in this direction, both on the part of some professors and many students, this interest - which is expressed by the specific and rich disciplinary expertise of the proposing lecturers - will find an expression in this seminar. Finally, this seminar is part of an ongoing process that the Department of Philosophy has been pursuing for some years now with regard to remembrance, in the scientific and cultural valorisation of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Workshop schedule:

11 Febbraio: Irene Kajon (Emerita Sapienza Università di Roma), Attualità di Maimonide. La Guida dei perplessi sulla condizione umana

25 Febbraio: Laura Sanò (Università di Padova), Rachel Bespaloff e la “doppia appartenenza”

4 Marzo: R. Alberto Ventura (Università di Torino), Benjamin, tradizione ebraica e marxismo

8 Aprile: Michela Torbidoni (University of Hamburg), Spinoza e le leggi noachidi

15 Aprile: Miriam Benfatto (Università di Bologna), Polemica ebraica anticristiana nel Medioevo e la sua fortuna moderna

6 Maggio: Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg), Marginalia nei manoscritti ebraici medioevali. Identità e polemiche ai margini