Synopses & Reviews
A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In
The Other Renaissance, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly antihumanist sentiments.
Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole.
Review
“Rubinis book is not just for Renaissance aficionados and historians—it is a study that sets standards of how intellectual history should be done: through entering the minds of the partners in the debate, understanding the philosophical issues from the inside, locating them in the human/personal as well as social and political contexts, and paying attention to the shifts and changes over time.”
Review
“Rubini has done something unique in this exhaustively researched, passionately argued book: he has shown definitively that interpretations of Italian Renaissance intellectual life are linked to modern Italian philosophy. His work has important ramifications for the history of literature and the history of philosophy as a whole. As he demonstrates, the Italian Renaissance and twentieth-century Italian intellectual life aré linked, both by subject matter (a strong focus on the ethical) and method (the prizing of dialogical, intellectually stimulating ambiguity, rather than syllogistic system-building, with the latter being the basis for Enlightenment-era historiography of philosophy). And the twentieth-century thinkers on whom Rubini is focused, Eugenio Garin and Ernesto Grassi especially, were themselves interested in the Italian fifteenth century, both as a neglected scholarly subject, consequently worthy of serious investigation, and as a source of modern philosophical reflection. No one has gone nearly as far as Rubini in developing a deep, precise, and exhaustively researched understanding of these thinkers and of these phenomena. His book will represent a touchstone, not only on the historiography of the Italian Renaissance, but also on the history of philosophy in Italy in the twentieth century.”
Synopsis
A single volume introduction to the major writers of the Italian Renaissance—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, della Mirandola, da Vinci, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Buonarroti, Guicciardini, Cellini, and Vasari.
About the Author
Rocco Rubini is assistant professor of Italian literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He is the editor of The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays, 1860-1968.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction: How We Came to Be Such As We Are and Not Otherwise
Humanism as Cartesianism
Humanism as Vichianism
A Peninsular Philosophy
Supplementing a Well-Known Story
Renaissance Scholarship and the History of Philosophy
A Note on Method
1. Philosophy and Revolution: Italian Vichianism and the Renaissance Shame”
Introduction
Vincenzo Cuoco and Italys Passive Revolution”
Italians as Disciples of God: Vincenzo Gioberti and Neo-Guelphism
Overcoming the Renaissance Shame”: Italian Hegelianism
Humanism Reborn and Fulfilled: From Positivism to Giovanni Gentiles Actualism
Conclusion: A Problem Unsolved
2. The (Re)Generation of Italian Thought: The Interwar Period
Introduction: Philosophizing in the Time of Fascism and Beyond
Twentieth-Century Humanists and Scholastics
Problematicism and Dialogism: Ugo Spirito and Guido Calogero
Philosophers in the Middle: The Outsiders”
Rehearsing Deprovincialization: Enrico Castelli and Nicola Abbagnano
Positive Existentialism
Conclusion
3. Averting the End of Tradition: Ernesto Grassi
Introduction
Between Italy and France: A Christian Thinkers Discontents
Heideggerianism Is a Platonism
Heideggerian Platonism May or May Not Be a (Nietzschean) True Humanism
Italian Renaissance Humanism Is Also a Humanism
Conclusion: Starting from Scratch (More or Less)
4. Holding It Together: Eugenio Garin
Introduction
Pichian Existentialism
Cassirer, Gentile, and the History of Italian Philosophy
The Making of the Italian Paradigm: Garin, Grassi, and Castelli
The Italian Paradigm Continued: Barons Civic Humanism” Is Also an Existentialism
Conclusion: Historicizing the Present through Gramscis Humanism”
5. A Philosophers Humanism: Paul Oskar Kristeller
Introduction: The Italian(s) Renaissance beyond Italy
Italy in the Interim: Between Gentile and Saitta
Ficino, a Diamond in the Rough: Kristellers Neo-Kantianism
Conclusion: Renaissance Scholarship as Philosophical Discourse
Conclusion: Humanism before Cartesianism (despite Heidegger)
Index