History of philosophy

Among these areas, the field also includes the Teaching of Philosophy. These disciplines share a common interest in a historical-critical study of traditions, lines of thought and philosophical works, and in the critical reading of texts in the light of their effectiveness and successive layers of interpretation.

Some of the main themes of the historical-philosophical research currently developed in the Department include:

• the dialogue between ancient western philosophy, on the border with the other specialist disciplines of antiquity, and the contemporary philosophical debate, with specific reference to metaphilosophical subjects (the relationship between philosophy, writing and paideia), Platonic epistemology and Aristotelian ethics;
• the dialogue between ancient western philosophy, on the border with the other specialist disciplines of antiquity, and the contemporary philosophical debate, with specific reference to metaphilosophical subjects (the relationship between philosophy, writing and paideia), Platonic epistemology and Aristotelian ethics;
• the intercultural and interreligious dialogue between late-ancient and medieval traditions (Jewish, Arabic, Islamic and Latin), countering any claim to a linear synthesis, reduction or ideological use of the term medieval philosophy;
• the philosophy of mind, language and action in medieval logical, theological and philosophical thought, particularly in the 14th century, in relation to the justification and translatability of models of thought between the Middle Ages and the modern and contemporary ages;
• the philosophical vocabulary of the Renaissance and the early modern age, with particular attention both to the ontological-metaphysical and ethical-religious fields;
• the reception and elaboration of classical sources in the modern age;
• conceptual constellations, cultural models, intellectual migrations and forms of knowledge between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries;
• the relations between philosophy, science, the arts and theology in ancient, modern and contemporary classical philosophy, in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and in contemporary thought;
• the impact of "secularisation" on the construction of theories in the gnoseological, ethical and philosophical-historical fields;
• the analysis of passions and theories of their "government" in seventeenth-century thought;
• the reception of seventeenth-century philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Leibniz) in the French philosophy of Enlightenment and in Italian and German philosophical culture of the nineteenth century;
• a comparative analysis of the paradigms of rationality between modern philosophy and contemporary thought;
• Italian philosophical and political thought between the Risorgimento and the early republican age, with particular reference to the constitution of the notion of Italian philosophical tradition in the reflections of Gioberti, Spaventa and Gentile;
• Italian theoretical Marxism, with specific reference to the elaborations of Antonio Labriola and Gramsci;
• the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile and his influence on Italian philosophy after the Second World War;
• the history of contemporary philosophy, in particular French philosophy, with particular regard to Foucault and Merleau-Ponty and, as far as the latter is concerned, with particular attention to its reflection from the point of view of the ecological question;
• the hermeneutics and philosophy of systems in modern and contemporary philosophy;
• the study of the theories of space and time in philosophical, scientific and artistic conceptions;
• the study of the forms of symbolic knowledge between the Middle Ages and the present;
• languages and thought in the development of Western philosophy;
• knowledge of the main didactic methodologies used in philosophy, didactic planning and the possibility of using new methodologies in teaching philosophy;
• conceptual history and its methodological contribution to the history of ideas;
• the notion of a historiographic object as a social object and the analysis of the filter applied to historical memory by supports for the transposition and diffusion of knowledge.