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Il saggio intende esaminare come il pensiero illuministico e pre-illuministico rivolge l’attenzione alla civiltà cinese, mettendo in evidenza le affinità ma anche le differenze con i vari aspetti della civiltà occidentale. Un ruolo primario riveste in particolare il pensiero di Leibniz, così come quello di Bayle, Wolff, Voltaire e Montesquieu. Tutti questi autori, pur con differenti approcci, più o meno positivi, si interessano alla civiltà della Cina così come descritta dal gesuita Matteo Ricci e da altri missionari vissuti molti anni in quelle terre.

Redatto in francese, il diario del viaggio attraverso Francia e Italia (1784–1786) del conte August Fryderyk Moszyński (1731–1786) – architetto, collezionista ed erudito, appassionato di arte e scienze, importante figura dell’Illuminismo polacco, collaboratore e amico del re Stanislao II Augusto – è una vera e propria miniera di informazioni per i ricercatori che si occupano del XVIII secolo. Lo scopo di questo articolo è quello di integrare o chiarire informazioni sulle ultime settimane di vita del conte trascorse a Padova e Venezia, e le circostanze della sua morte, nonché di scoprire se sia stato un promotore della cultura polacca durante il suo viaggio in Veneto. L’analisi del suo diario permette l’identificazione di elementi riguardanti reali o ipotetici legami tra la cultura della Serenissima e quella della Confederazione Polacco-Lituana, così come un confronto tra la vita politica e culturale dei due paesi. Citazioni tratte dal diario sono state rapportate ad altre fonti dell’epoca, grazie alle quali è stato possibile stabilire, tra l’altro, che Moszyński visitò Padova sulla strada per Venezia, intorno al 22 maggio 1786, e tornò in quella città per vedere la gara di cavalli a Prato della Valle il 27 giugno 1786. Documenti d’archivio conservati a Varsavia e a Venezia hanno consentito a loro volta di stabilire con certezza le circostanze della morte (luogo, data, causa) e della sepoltura (data, luogo) del viaggiatore.

The paper is inspired by a story taken from Mania (1997) by Daniele del Giudice, Fuga; at the center of which is one of the most remarkable constructions of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, the ‘Cemetery of the 366 pits’, designed by the architect Ferdinando Fuga. The story is read as a philosophical apologue, that must be interpreted in the light of some central themes of Daniele del Giudice’s reflection (treated above all in the novel Atlante occidentale). The modern myth of ‘Utopia’ is the background to this reflection, recalled in one of its most macroscopic original emblems: the geometric design of the city space as an expression of a rational order. The modern myth of the map and the atlas (perfect symbolic translation of scientist planning) finds in Fuga, in the form of the allegorical tale, a sort of parodic reversal, suggesting to the reader an aporia that is at the root of Western Modernity: the awareness that «utopia is necessary », but in its unlimited design potential, is contained «its opposite, its failure».

Libraries always have been evidence of civilization, culture, tradition, and progress. However, from the Enlightenment period and especially after the French Revolution, libraries become a factor of not only individual, but also collective and social education and elevation. In 1837, Louis Aimé Martin – conservator of the library of Saint Geneviève in Paris – published the essay Plan d’une bibliotheque universelle, where the library is described as a national educational enterprise whose aim is to bring together within the sameprinciples all classes of society. The essay cites the works of the most notable authors of all disciplines, divided by nations for the literary sphere.

Il contributo mette in rilievo il percorso accidentato della conciliazione tra fede e ragione nel pensiero di Manzoni dal fatidico anno 1817, l’anno della sua crisi morale e religiosa, al 1819, l’anno in cui Manzoni diede alle stampe la prima edizione della Morale cattolica, la sua opera apologetica più nota e importante. Dal ruolo di Luigi Tosi, guida spirituale della famiglia Manzoni, allo strisciante giansenismo, dalla formazione illuministica all’insegna di Voltaire e Rousseau al sofferto ritorno alla fede cattolica, il trentaduenne Manzoni rifiuta la divaricazione tra dottrina cattolica e ragione e fra morale cattolica e storia, ponendo le basi, nella sua civile ed elegante polemica contro l’Histoire des Républiques italiennes au Moyen Age di Sismondi, per la sua futura poetica espressa nella Lettre a M. Chauvet e al contempo aprendo paradossalmente la strada agli esiti tardi della Storia della colonna infame e del saggio comparativo sulla Rivoluzione francese del 1789 e la Rivoluzione italiana del 1859.

In 1957 Martin Heidegger highlighted how the computer language could be a poor imitation of the human language. The computer, infact, can reproduce only the logical and mathematical skills of the human mind, not the feelings and the ethics. Neither Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who in 1758 theorized the figure of the so called Machine man, had advanced the hypothesis that a machine could reproduce the psychic and intellectual abilities of a human being. This hypothesis is affected by some of the unique characteristics of the human species, among which the sensitivity for music.

Johann Georg Meusel’s Leitfaden aus Geschichte der Gelehrsamkeit (Leipzig 1799-1800) is one of the most important historical works about European culture at the end of the 18th century. The six sections at the end of the work are of great interest for the history of the eighteenth century and the Illuminism. Meusel realizes in this part of the work a remarkable picture of this period, extremely accurate and astonishingly modern.

With the publication of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, which dates from 1751, the concept of library is declined in a negative sense, as a closing tool and impediment in the hands of the State, compared to the Encyclopedia, considered the book of the people. The constitution of the public library (the british Public Libraries Act is dated 1850), funded with public money, determines to change and both realities, Library and Encyclopedia, begin to interact contributing to the development of contemporary culture. Such as the Library, the Encyclopedia also supposes a work of organization of knowledge through classifications. From this point of view, both institutions seem closer in a purpose that unites them. In view of the information revolution, the Library should help reduce complexity of digital information and should play, against the vastness of the network, a role similar to what the Enlightenment Encyclopedia has assigned to itself in the face of large library collections, which were seen as points of accumulation, and also as points of the knowledge’s dispersion.

Although Voltaire's expression "philosophy of history" was nothing more than a critical approach to the study of history, it is well known that his work as a historian - and, first of all, in his Essai sur les murs - was intended to be an attempt to provide a new object. historical inquiry: the "history of the human spirit." This conception of history, by the very nature of its object, can only aspire to universality, but, on the other hand, it requires that history be constructed and structured in accordance with a logic and criteria of coherence that bend the mere Empirical contingency of becoming historical to a rational order: in this contradictory need lie the originality and limitations of the historical Voltaian method.

Three centuries ago, Giuseppe Baretti was born in Turin. This essay traces its personality, voyages and movements, with particular attention to never easy relationships with the Italian Enlightenment and for those decidedly better with British intellectual world, known by the Piedmontese journalist and writer through two long stays full of books and various activities. After three hundred years, a controversial and not without charm, emblematic and fascinating figure of XVIIIth century culture emerges again.

The present article takes into exam the French-Italian literary controversy that took place in 1765 and which, despite its brief duration, revived the national sentiment in a wide portion of the Italian cultured world. The dispute began in response to an anonymous "Lettre", although sent by the French Alexandre Deleyre (1726-1797), published on march 1765 in the Parisian journal "Gazette littéraire de l’Europe": according to the controversial Encyclopedist, eighteenth century Italy was in full moral, cultural, political and economic decadence. The Italian poet Agostino Paradisi il Giovane (1736-1783) sent to the Venetian journal «La Minerva» a very well informed anonymous "Epistola". It was printed on october 1765, and is to be considered the clearest and most thoughtful response from the Italian side to Deleyre’s denounces and accusations.

Si ripercorre il ben noto rapporto tra l’episodio manzoniano della monaca di Monza e La Religieuse e si mette in luce il diverso orizzonte narrativo e stilistico che la presentazione della “signora” assume nel Fermo e Lucia e nei Promessi Sposi. Il racconto di Diderot, affidato alla voce del personaggio femminile, nasce da una sorta di gioco, in una vera e propria mistificazione, che comunque si svolge come critica all’istituzione monastica. Quello di Manzoni si appoggia sulla voce dell’autore, in una prospettiva di giudizio morale sui comportamenti dei personaggi, che non mette in causa l’istituzione. Si nota poi come molti particolari del testo manzoniano, sia nel Fermo e Lucia che nella redazione finale dei Promessi Sposi, si definiscono attraverso un impegno di distinzione dalla prospettiva del testo di Diderot.

This article focuses on the famous case of Jean Calas’s trial and on the defense made by Voltaire after Calas’ death. Voltaire’s complex operation succeed in mobilizing public opinion and was resumed in the well known Traité sur la tolérance, an early example of the typical scheme of the affaire. Through the analysis of the public opinion in France during the XVIII century, we will demonstrate the ambivalence of Voltaire’s thoughts in relation to this concept: one one side reign of the irrationality, when linked to the local reality, on the other, source of truth when enlightened and universal.

The essay is an historical reconstruction of the roots of the new modern science made by the disciples of Galileo and Newton. The connection between the science of Galileo and the experimental philosophy of Newton was clear and already present in the mind of the Italian scholars who lived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often forced to operate in a cultural climate is not easy, because of censorship restrictions and inquisitorial the then Italian society. Neither helped them political and institutional fragmentation of the ancient Italian states. Yet, amidst the echoes of deism Spinoza and in contact with the intellectual ferment of the crisis of European conscience at the end of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers of the peninsula managed, between Florence and Naples, to save Galileo's scientific legacy to hand, through the great synthesis Newtonian, the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment reform, not without many second thoughts and problems of practical difficulties in academic areas.

How and when the Newtonian science came and won his intellectual battles in Scotland, during the Eighteenth century? This case-study try to answer with an historical research about the relationships between Newton's science and Enlightenment Scottish culture, also rethinking the works of so many protagonists of the academic life, in the period 1680-1800: a true geography of the Newtonian scientific and philosophical legacy, during a central century for the developments of the European modern thought, also in the Continent.

Between Provisions and Care. Mothers and Fathers in the Age of the Enlightenment This contribution fits in with a relatively recent research path that aims to reconstruct the history of educational relations by also taking social diversity and the gender roles of the subjects concerned into account, in the light of the great deal of historiographical material aiming to give substance to entities that are often considered in an abstract and symbolic manner, even within a long obsolete pedagogical tradition. This work particularly dwells on the debate carried on between the 18th and 19th century in the history of western culture with respect to the social role of motherhood, considered by intellectuals and politicians as a value to be rediscovered in order to avoid, amongst other things, the damage caused by a high child mortality rate. The Enlightenment tradition, and more specifically the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, forms the basis for a new paradigm of childhood charged with the redeeming task of regenerating humankind and that is linked to a view of motherhood exalted in its immutable naturalness. What tends to emerge is a bourgeois view of female identity that is triumphant at the symbolic level in 19th century religious, pedagogical and juridical percepts, but becomes a moral constraint for women and may thus be considered as antithesis to every form of intellectual and social emancipation. While, for women, being a mother would increasingly be considered a duty, for some men «of exception» being a loving father would mean a new kind of yearning and a «place» of utopian thinking.

La tragedia spagnola Lucrecia Pazzi di Francisco Rodríguez de Ledesma, pubblicata e rappresentata nel 1805, viene presa in esame parallelamente alla Congiura de’ Pazzi —a cui si è evidentemente ispirata— per verificarne la dose di «alfierianesimo». Dato che l’autore spagnolo è pressoché sconosciuto, in primo luogo si indaga attraverso i dati offerti dai suoi scritti (in mancanza di dati biografici) sulla sua attività di traduttore e scrittore impegnato, in cui la produzione creativa appare come un’esperienza non centrale, epperò di un certo rilievo. Il raffronto fra la tragedia spagnola e quella italiana viene realizzato su diversi aspetti, dalla scena ai personaggi, dall’utilizzazione della fonte comune (le Istorie fiorentine di Machiavelli) all’onomastica; ma attraverso queste analisi si cerca di individuarne soprattutto la diversissima impostazione ideologica, che permette di affermare che la tragedia spagnola ha una sua autonomia e originalità —a prescindere da considerazioni valutative— restando più vicina agli autori dell’illuminismo spagnolo che al radicalismo libertario della Congiura de’ Pazzi alfieriana

I libri stampati: si possono acquistare anonimamente in contanti; quindi se ne è proprietari: non dobbiamo firmare una licenza che ne restringe l’uso: il loro formato è noto e per leggerli non occorrono tecnologie proprietarie; si possono dare, prestare o...

Depositato nell’archivio “Giuliano Marini”, l’articolo di Francesca Di Donato offre una prospettiva storica sul modo e sul grado di consapevolezza teorica con cui gli studiosi organizzano se stessi L’espressione respublica literaria compare per la prima volta nel 1417 in una lettera scritta da Francesco Barbaro a Poggio Bracciolini. La repubblica delle lettere è la comunità [...]

Alla fine del XVIII secolo, prima e durante la Rivoluzione francese, Kant scrisse intensamente di politica. Questo libro, incluso nella collana Methexis, raccoglie le traduzioni, con le annotazioni della curatrice, delle sue opere filosofico-politiche principali, dal saggio sull’Illuminismo fino allo scritto sul progresso. Per quanto il testo nel suo complesso sia sottoposto a un regime [...]