Tempo e giustizia: sulla lettura heideggeriana di Anassimandro

Heidegger’s philosophy has been interpreted as an absolute historicism, unable to point to a unhistorical standpoint from which history can be judged upon. K. Löwith, for instance, has indicated that the cause of this difficulty is to be found in the conception of time: whereas, in Greek thought, time was considered only as a manifestation of the essence, in modern thought time has the tendency to become the essence itself, as that which fulfills itself in time, up to Heidegger’s identification of being and event. What is interesting in my critique is that the conception of time is strictly interwoven with a specific way of conceiving justice and, broadly speaking, ethics. In Plato’s philosophy, justice as measure corresponds to a cyclical and even retrogressive conception of time, the one enounced in the myth of Chronos, in the Politikos. The modern conception of time, spiritualistic and biologistic, is instead cyclical and irreversible, cumulative: its most significant expression is Hegelianism. The existential conception of time, instead, is neither cyclical nor cumulative. By commenting on Heidegger’s Anaximander’s Saying, I wish to show the possibility of conceiving temporality as disjunction (injustice) and only as such capable of producing justice – which I understand as a new possibility of meaning that does not exclude, but carries within itself, emancipation. An ethics of the present developed on the basis of this conception of time – which Heidegger has not completely endorsed – would then be an ethics which accepts as its own ground the discontinuous, yet inventive, dimension of time

Leer de otro modo. Sinestesia y diagramaticalidad de la escritura

El problema del logocentrismo, es decir, la idea misma de la escritura fonética es más un problema de lectura que de escritura. Como el mismo Derrida sugiere, la solución del logocentrismo no consiste en un modo distinto de escribir sino en un modo distinto de leer los textos de la tradición, es decir, consiste en la necesidad de realizar una lectura sinestésica o pluridimensional. La misma palabra “différance” cuyo sentido nace únicamente de la interacción entre la voz y la mirada, es el emblema de esta nueva lectura y alude no a algo relativo al objeto sino a un hecho que constituye su registro diagramático.The problem of logocentrism, namely the idea itself of phonetic writing, is not so much a problem of writing but of reading. As Derrida himself suggests, the exit from logocentrism does not consist in a different way of writing, but rather in a different way of reading the texts of traditino: a reading ncessarily synaesthesic or multidimensional. Emblematic of this new modality of reading is the word “différance”, whose sense comes out only from interactin between voice and sight an alludes, not to something objectual, but an even, of which it constitutes the diagrammatic registration

Identity and difference: Severino and Heidegger

The concept of identity represents one of the most significant concepts through which to measure the philosophies of Severino and Heidegger. For Severino, identity cannot be the identity of the different, because the identity of the different, or of the non‐identical, is exactly the concept of becoming, which leads to the idea that wood becomes ash, and thus is ash, or, in general, that the subject is the predicate, that A is B, or not‐A (which is a contradiction). Unlike Severino, Heidegger conceives of identity as a “synthesis of the different”, as is clear in his interpretation of Parmenides’ Fragment 3 in Identity and Difference: the same (das Selbe) is not the identical (das Gleiche). The problem of the relation between identity and difference can be traced back to the debate between Monists and Pluralists in Plato’s Sophist: this discussion will be the focus of the conclusion, where I try to show that the different (ἕτερον) is not the condition of the contradiction, but what prevents it

The Critical Import of the Image: from Freud to Magritte

In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud asks how and if the dream, which is made of images, can express its connective structure, and in particular the negation. This can be made only by interpretation. This question represents the thread to examine the problem of the critical import of figurative arts, by comparing Adorno’s and Heidegger’s theories. According to Adorno, the artwork is mimesis: the capability to express negativity coincides with its autonegation, with its disappearing. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the artwork is first of all a work, and interpretation is the reconstruction of its genesis, or better, the understanding of it as temporal. In the last part of the text the problem of the relationship between negation and image is tackled discussing Magritte’s painting «Ceci n’est pas une pipe» : the structure of this painting (it is formed by images and words) makes it a rebus (like the dream, according to Freud), the deciphering of which carries a conceptual and interpretative work. Only this interpretation can account for the negation that it, as image, could otherwise not express

Žmogaus pasaulis kaip tikrovės prieaugis: transcendentalizmas ir antropologinis skirtumas

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] In this paper, I discuss, first of all, the positions of Perter Singer and Jacques Derrida regarding the difference between humans and animals. Singer’s animalism seems to me grounded in a naturalist substantialism (since it aims at dissolving the abovementioned difference in a common genus, animality), whereas Derrida’s approach ends in a phenomenological primitivism (since it aims at grasping the gaze of the animal through an epoché of the human cultural world). The result is, on the one hand, an essentialist reduction to the One, and, on the other, the nominalist multiplication of the Many. As an alternative to both these perspectives, I share a certain “transcendentalist” approach, in which human difference appears as a capacity to form a world in the Heideggerian meaning, which increases natural reality. The symbol of this new capacity is the upright position, a certain elevation above nature, the sign of which is consciousness. I call this new capacity “diagonal,” since, like the diagonal of the square, it is irreducible to its side – to nature (the plane of immanence) –, as much as the human world of “augmented reality” is indeed irreducible to every flat ontology, that is, to an onticology.[straipsnis ir santrauka anglų kalba, santrauka lietuvių kalba] Šiame straipsnyje pirmiausia apsvarstomos Peterio Singerio ir Jacques’o Derrida pozicijos dėl žmonių ir gyvūnų skirtumo. Singerio animalizmą straipsnio autorius laiko grindžiamu natūralistiniu substancializmu (nes minėtą skirtumą siekiama „ištirpinti“ bendroje rūšyje, gyvūniškume), o Derrida požiūrį mano esant artinantį prie fenomenologinio primityvizmo (nes siekiama sugriebti gyvūno žvilgsnį „suskliaudžiant“ žmogiškąjį kultūros pasaulį). Tad vienu atveju rezultatas yra esencialistinė redukcija į Vienį, o kitu – nominalistinis Daugio dauginimas. Kaip alternatyvą šioms dviem perspektyvoms straipsnio autorius siūlo „transcendentalinę“ prieigą, kai žmogiškasis skirtumas pasirodo kaip galia formuoti pasaulį (heidegeriška prasme), kuris tampa prieaugiu gamtinės tikrovės atžvilgiu. Šios naujos galios simbolis yra stačia stovėsena, tam tikras pakilimas virš gamtos, kurio ženklas yra sąmonė. Šią naują galią autorius vadina „įstrižaine“, nes, kaip įstrižainė neredukuojama į kvadrato kraštinę, ji neredukuojama ir į gamtą (imanencijos plotmę). Iš tikrųjų, žmogiškasis pasaulis kaip „tikrovės prieaugis“ yra neredukuojamas į jokią plokštumos ontologiją, t. y. į ontikologiją

The effects of a hypocaloric diet and cinchona supplementation on nutritional status and body composition in a population of obese adults

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality and disability in humans worldwide. Obesity is a chronic disease present worldwide, considered as an etiological risk factors that can cause the onset of cardiovascular diseases. Currently, the most effective therapies to reduce the cardiovascular risk associated with obesity is an healthy lifestyle represented by dietary changes and physical activity. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of a hypocaloric diet associated with a cinchona supplementation on nutritional status and body composition in a population of obese adults. A total of forty obese subjects of both sexes with Body Mass Index (BMI) ≥ 30 kg/m2 attending at Outpatients Clinic of the Departmental program "Physiology Nutrition Unit ", School of Medicine, "Federico II" University of Naples, were recruited. Subjects were randomized into 2 groups. The first group was treated with hypocaloric diet for 2 months plus supplementation of Cinchona (C group); the second one was treated with hypocaloric diet for 2 months plus a placebo supplementation (P group). Anthropometric measurements as well as bioimpedance analysis, abdominal fat distribution and basal metabolic rate were evaluated at baseline and after 60 days. At the end of observations, we observed a significant improvement in nutritional status and body composition in patients belonging to C group compared with subjects belonging to P group. . Therefore, this study demonstrates that the association of hypocaloric diet with a nutraceutical supplementation is able to induce a more significant weight loss than that obtained with a hypocaloric diet alone

Indescifrabilidad y comprensión radical

The message sent through the spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 addressed to possible extraterrestrial beings, is the opportunity for a reflection on the minimal intelligibility conditions of writing. The radical comprehension – expression recalling the Quine’s “radical translation” and Davidson’s “radical interpretation” – concerns that lowest content of comprehension that constitutes the writing as such, making it something that demands to be understood even in its indecipherability. Such minimum content consists in its being a trace of an existence. This thesis is supported by re-going through the sense of the subjective turning point of modern philosophy that has placed the diagrammatic dimension of writing on a prominent position. Examples are the Fregean ideography (as “diagram of truth”) on the one hand and the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams (as “diagram of desire”) on the other hand. This turning point comes to its level of radicalism in the Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics that indissolubly weaves together comprehension and existence to the point that is possible to establish an analogy between the existential analysis and the several grades of text decipherability as it is here suggested: the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic existence can be read as passage from the semantic (radical interpretation) to the syntactic (radical translation) and to the ontological level (radical comprehension). The radical comprehension level is the one in which the lowest content of comprehension coincides with its formal condition of possibility: in which comprehending is to comprehend an existence