Le scritture dei filosofi. Introduzione

Abstract

The Count of Buffon stated that ‘style is the man’. What this monographic issue of «Thaumazein» intends to demonstrate is that ‘style is the philosopher’. The manner in which a thinker expounds his theory is one with the content of it. So, is philosophy a literature? The history of philosophy can be read as a long quest in this sense: from Plato, who harnesses his artistic vein in the form of Socratic dialogues, to Lucretius, who chooses to contain his ideas in a poem, to Seneca, who pours them out in letters, to Marcus Aurelius, who makes a conversation with his own soul; and again, from Campanella and Bacon, who narrate utopia following the example of the Platonic myth of Atlantis, to Galileo, the greatest Italian prose writer of his century; from Descartes and his mathematical method, to Hegel and his academic rival Schopenhauer. Freud forbade himself from reading Nietzsche so as not to be overly influenced by him, while Bergson was the philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Wittgenstein is the ultimate censor of language, while Eco uses his massmediological knowledge to give birth to philosophical novels. In this issue the authors will focus on a number of philosophers, from the ancients Pherecydes and Plato to Hegel, Emerson and Nietzsche, to the more contemporary Benjamin, Bloch, Blumenberg, Girard, Bachelard, Colli and Deleuze, each representative of a unique style that illuminates both the nuances of their personalities and the hallmarks of their times.