Thaumàzein | Rivista di Filosofia

Introduction

2025-10-15T09:06:00+00:00

It is challenging to delineate a comprehensive account of the relationship between philosophy and literature, due to the ancient, profound and complex nature of their interconnection. This relationship is not merely one of proximity. Instead, it represents an intricate intertwining that involves the various ways in which humans derive meaning from the world and existence itself. Philosophy explores this meaning through concepts and logical argumentation, whereas literature does so through narrative, symbols and imagery. Yet, the boundaries between these two domains are often porous and permeable: philosophy can take on narrative forms, while literature frequently incorporates existential and metaphysical reflections, thereby giving rise to a shared area for inquiry and interpretation. It is in this space that philosophy and literature meet and engage in a dialogue of thought, not as discrete disciplines but as complementary means of examining the human condition. The current issue of Thaumàzein is structured in two parts. The first part examines works that exist «between» these two spheres – literary texts that are inherently philosophical. The second part shifts towards a perspective that is more explicitly philosophical-phenomenological, hermeneutical, aesthetic or religious – in order to explore the fruitful hybridisation between literature and philosophy.

Il seme del pianto

2025-05-08T15:42:41+00:00

Reading Simone Weil’s works represented for Elsa Morante the discovery of a thought close to her own and at the same time the occasion for a deeper understanding of her original intellectual and spiritual dispositions. A now established writer, the comparison with Weil’s thought was decisive in guiding her poetic exploration toward a direction that might have seemed at odds with her personality, but which led her to a different perception of herself and of the world destined to give form and substance to her last works, especially La Storia. This second Morante, just like Weil who had passed through the factory and the civil war in Spain, found themselves forced, at a crucial moment in their lives, to take a step in an unknown direction and had the moral courage to follow it to the end, leaving no stone unturned to make tangible in thoughts or poetry the part of truth that was manifesting itself to them, to the point of overturning the relationship between reality and unreality. The comparison with the work of Simone Weil had an important role for Elsa Morante also played a crucial role in reinforcing Morante’s conviction about the political function of art, which she would end up assuming as a task: to oppose with the weapon of poetry the disintegration of human consciousness.

«Hortus Mortis». Le riflessioni sulla guerra negli scritti filosofici e letterari di Vernon Lee (1914-1920)

2025-05-19T14:02:38+00:00

The first part of the essay draws a brief profile of the French-born British cosmopolitan intellectual Vernon Lee (1856-1935) focusing on her pacifist writings published during the Great War. The central part dwells on Satan the Waster, a complex, experimental piece: an allegorical drama, a reflection on collective psychology, on the very idea of reality, and a personal memory. What were the influences, associations and habits that led to participation in the war with enthusiasm or passivity? How had the dark waves of emotions acted dragging the warring societies into a spiral of fear, suspicion and hatred? Philosophy, social psychology, but also literature and art could have helped to reaffirm the sense of reality the war and its illusions had dissolved or distorted.

La scrittura autobiografica: problematicità ed inganni. Tracce per una maieutica

2025-06-25T07:23:32+00:00

The paper highlights the complexity of setting out to write one’s history. Autobiography is a philosophical genre that requires a willingness to discuss one’s past and present, and it requires serious and lengthy self-reflective and self-critical work, as well as a moral confrontation with the dimension of time lived. The text is divided into four parts and an epilogue: the first is a critical introduction; the second illustrates the maieutic nature and philosophical implications of the autobiographical genre; the third highlights the impossibility of writing the “perfect” autobiography. The final section, in addition to being devoted to the notion of “autobiographical time,” invites the reader to get involved, surrender to the current of memories, and experience the generative effects of this approach to existence, which discovers how the autobiographical process is comparable to the beginning of a “second life” under the banner of a philosophical initiation.

«Amour dure». Variazioni sul tema dell'amore oltre la morte

2025-06-06T08:38:29+00:00

This study outlines a path through the infinite ways and resources of imagination and culture with which humanity, through literature, has sought over the centuries not only to make thinkable perhaps the cruellest of all private events, the loss of a loved one, but also to put in communication, and in both directions, the world of the living and the world of the dead: communication that oscillates between an immaterial if not transcendent way, and an immanent one, suspected of fetishism. Thus, we find confidence in the future reunion of souls for new celestial marriages and idolization of the dead body or parts of it (mostly the severed head), Orphic rites aimed at reopening the doors closed by the Angel of death and attempts to revive the loved one now with occult practices, now with substitution dynamics, even by means of mechanical devices and doubles. In the opposite direction, the surviving person cultivates the illusion that a sort of Love-phoenix has consumed the ashes of its wings to be reborn only immortal, bringing the dearest being back to the world from which he had been forced to depart. And now he fantasizes about imminent or already accomplished returns in ectoplasmic form, revealed by sighs and invisible caresses, now he glimpses, reflected in some object belonging to the lost person, or carried by natural entities and phenomena, the vestiges of the ancient flame, or again – supreme hypothesis – he sees the adored figure materialize, as if alive.

The Dermicity of Phenomenology and Literature.

2025-05-07T07:39:38+00:00

From Jean-Paul Sartre to Bruce Bégout, many of those who dive into phenomenology have also dived into literature. Is this a coincidence merely due to a historical moment particularly appropriate for the emergence of literary forms of philosophical enquiry? Is it due to a certain disposition towards the literary description of experience that phenomenologists share? Or is it due to a more intrinsic link between phenomenology and literature? In this article, I look into these questions by studying literature’s significance for phenomenology and how Proust can be seen as a proto-phenomenologist, to then examine Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ stands regarding Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In this examination, literature appears not only as relevant for phenomenology but even as coinciding with it, the degree of dermicity between philosophy and literature achieving with phenomenology its acme. I conclude by comparing Levinas’ and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the sensible with regards to their focal theme and their interpretation of what philosophical discourse should become.

The Truth of the Fairy Tale in Simone Weil

2025-05-06T09:42:27+00:00

In this article, the dialogue between philosophy and literature unfolds through the prism of Simone Weil’s meditation on fairy tales. With their distinctive narrative structures and evocative language, fairy tales transport us into a realm of suspension – one that transcends the coordinates of ordinary space and time, embodying a symbolic and spiritual dimension. Although they recount fantastic events that never happened, fairy tales do not deceive; rather, they convey spiritual truths through symbolic figures and allegorical tableaux. A lover of Grimm’s fairy tales, Simone Weil never considered them works of pure fantasy. In her view, fairy tales held a profound mystical resonance. Far from being simple entertainment for children, they unveil an inner dimension capable of opening the soul to the Good and to God.

Philosophy, Literature, and Nihilism

2025-05-13T09:53:37+00:00

In this essay I introduce the problematic relationship that in the Western tradition has linked and separated philosophy and literature. In order to do so, I focus in particular on two thinkers who have constantly reflected on this topic, S. Kierkegaard and F. Pessoa, emphasizing, beyond easy parallels, the profound differences that distinguish their respective thoughts. I focus the analysis on the communicative theories developed by Kierkegaard and Pessoa, to highlight the essential difference between pseudonymy and heteronymy.

From Utopia to Ethics of the Image

2025-05-08T14:00:46+00:00

This work aims to present Roland Barthes’ and Maurice Blanchot’s views on literature and its relation to philosophy. The article presents Barthes’ position of literature which is related to utopia, mythology, style, and the death of the author. Barthes stated that literature is a world-forming force, functioning like an utopia, and it cannot be reduced to semiology. Literature, in Barthes’ sense, is a meaning producing power that functions in a mythological manner by creating never-ending interpretations. The death of the author allows literature to be freed from the context of the author. In a rather similar way to Barthes’, Blanchot stated that the third person is more important than “I” in literature. For Blanchot, literature has its own abstract space in which various transformations of the writer and the reader are possible. In Blanchot’s sense, the writer and the work are not identical to each other, and the writer has to give up her subjectivity in the process of writing literature. Blanchot also related literature to ethical dimension as ethics of the image which opens up the relation to the Other.

On the Most Torn Dephts of History

2025-07-01T07:59:16+00:00

Although Jean Wahl is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, his literary career as a writer and metaphysical poet has remained relatively unknown. He is an emblematic figure in the history of philosophy. By dwelling on the boundary between philosophical and poetic-literary reflection, Wahl demonstrates through his biography and intellectual work the inseparable nature of these disciplines. In a perpetual state of mutual struggle yet complementarity, both directed towards the search for Truth, philosophy and literature only find their authentic nature when mirroring each other. Through the establishment of the Décades de Pontigny en Amérique and the Collège philosophique, Wahl laid the foundations for an ongoing dialogue between the dominant trends in philosophy and literature, in a spirit of continuous exchange and interdisciplinarity. Having survived deportation and forced exile «at the very edge of the catastrophe» of World War II, Wahl was able to establish the conditions for ongoing intellectual conversation, situating his philosophical reflections and poetics within these biographical events. Recovering original texts from his American exile and wartime will enable us to reconstruct the limits of such a dialogical polemos, and to reach, with Wahl, a philosophical poetics and a philosophy characterised by literary reflection.

On the Epistemology of phantasia: Goethean Science Between Empirical Inquiry and Phantasmatic Vision as Epitomized in the poem Eins und Alles (1821)

2025-07-01T10:18:15+00:00

The fact that Goethe – in his posture that is essentially philosophical (and, it must be stressed, not weltanschaulich) – employs analogy as cognitive method and tool in both the scientific and the poetic field, is by now widely and uncontroversially acknowledged in Goethean scholarship. Therefore, what this essay first aims to demonstrate, is not so much the functioning of the analogical process as it takes shape in Goethe, but rather its phantasmatic origin – that is, to show the consubstantiality of imagination (phantasia) and analogy. The objective is thus to situate more precisely the role of imagination within Goethe’s epistemological horizon, reaffirming the centrality of analogically operating imagination alongside conceptual logic. In the second and final part of the essay, the intention is to read Goethe’s philosophical poem Eins und Alles (One and All) as an epitome of his philosophical posture. By superimposing different levels of reading – one logical-conceptual, the other symbolic-phantasmatic – of the poem’s second stanza, which stages the alleged confrontation between Weltseele (world soul) and Weltgeist (world spirit), the essay seeks to put into practice the theory of Goethe’s scientific approach and thereby assess its epistemological value within the poetic space.