Italian philosophy provides a long-overdue and much-needed supplement to continental thinking. This book offers some living and lively examples, some for the first time in English, of original thought from the Italian philosophical scene. The contributors--seventeen leading Italian philosophers--offer perspectives from many areas, particularly ethics, politics, and religion. Contemporary Italian Philosophy includes a primarily historical introduction and is composed of three parts, corresponding with the unfolding of past, present, and futural thinking.

This is the first collection of essays in English that deals directly with the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo from a purely critical perspective, further establishing his rightful place in contemporary European philosophy. Vattimo, who first came to prominence as the translator of Gadamer's Truth and Method into Italian, is now considered to be more than a philosopher and prolific author. As a former member of the European Parliament (1999-2004), he is also a public intellectual. This book takes up his call to advance the crucial active and affirmative engagement with thinking and society. More...

Arguing that the virtual body is something new--namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world--Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings--they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human...

Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991) was one of the most important Italian philosophers to emerge after World War II and stands shoulder to shoulder with fellow hermeneutic thinkers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. The product of a well-developed theory of interpretation that stretches back to the late 1940s, his 1971 masterpiece Truth and Interpretation provides the historical impetus and theoretical framework for the questions of existence, art, and politics that would motivate his most famous students, Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo. In a time when the meaning of truth as an...