Browsing by Subject "Philosophy of History"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Living thought and living things On Roberto Esposito’s "Il pensiero vivente"
    (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2013) Franchi, Stefano
    The essay discusses Roberto Esposito’s claim that Italian thought and the Italian tradition offer philosophy a way out of the dire situation it has fallen into as a consequence of the linguistic turn it took at the beginning of the 20th century. According to Esposito, Italian thought is animated by a genealogical vocation generating political, historical, and life paradigms that may revive philosophy’s universal ambitions against its current linguistic relativism. The essay discusses this claim in light of the tension between ontology and history that Esposito himself raises. It concludes that the opportunities opened up by Italy’s “genealogical vocation” should be supplemented by a philosophy of history that is currently lacking from Esposito’s account.
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    Melancholia in contemporary Spain: digging up a past that did not pass away
    (Routledge, 2021) Pérez Baquero, Rafael; Filosofía
    During its transition to democracy (1975–1983), Spanish society did not confront the memory of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and participated in what is called “a pact of oblivion.” However, at the beginning of this century, it might be observed that the memories of the victims buried in unidentified common graves return in multiple cultural and political practices, evoking a particular type of melancholia about the past. This chapter delves into how a positive type of melancholia shapes the cultural and political processes of recovering the collective memory in twenty-first-century Spain. Its purpose is to substantiate the thesis that, within the current post-war context in Spain, investing melancholia with a political potential has triggered the disruption of homogeneous temporality and brought upon anachronistic temporality. The latter frames the victims of the Spanish Civil War as living civilians and is a necessary step in recovering the rights and dignities that were denied them by the Francoist authorities.
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    Multilayered temporalities underlying transitional justice: rethinking resentment and melancholia from Jean Améry and Walter Benjamin
    (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) Pérez Baquero, Rafael; Filosofía
    After the collective violence of the twentieth century, political debates on how to deal with historical debts stemming from such dreadful events have become the ground upon which ethical categories engage with sociohistorical processes. Due to events such as the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, the Apartheid, or colonial warfare, notions of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and political forgiveness were brought to the fore in public discourse and ethical debates. Owing to the legacies of such violence within post-conflict societies, there is a growing sense that the unsettling past persists in the present demanding recognition and accountability. Obviously, the victims who had suffered systematic and state-sponsored violence have become a prism through which unsettling historical debts haunt the present. Dealing with the voices of victims demanding justice and reparation is considered the most important goal of the juridical and political processes defined as “transitional justice,” which provides priceless resources for ensuring both stability and legitimacy of new democracies, after violent political transformations. At the end of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world—South America, Eastern and Southern Europe, South Africa—new democratic regimes emerged from authoritarian dictatorships. The new democracies not only had to deal with the tasks of reconstructing and modernizing their societies to avoid falling back into struggles but they also had to prosecute the crimes committed by those who had previously held power....