- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804781305
- eISBN:
- 9780804783682
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804781305.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter focuses on Giovanni Gentile's philosophical idealism and his treatment of political issues. Gentile related modern political philosophy to the political doctrines of Giuseppe Mazzini, ...
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This chapter focuses on Giovanni Gentile's philosophical idealism and his treatment of political issues. Gentile related modern political philosophy to the political doctrines of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose religion he saw as being at the very heart of Mazzini's thought, and was quick to defend its presence. He also argued that Mazzini was a precursor of fascism, which was the culmination of the efforts of the major political leaders of the Risorgimento.Less
This chapter focuses on Giovanni Gentile's philosophical idealism and his treatment of political issues. Gentile related modern political philosophy to the political doctrines of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose religion he saw as being at the very heart of Mazzini's thought, and was quick to defend its presence. He also argued that Mazzini was a precursor of fascism, which was the culmination of the efforts of the major political leaders of the Risorgimento.
Rocco Rubini
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186139
- eISBN:
- 9780226186276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186276.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification ...
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This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification movement, to the early twentieth century. Among the protagonists of this transgenerational conversation are: Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823), who was the first to turn to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico programmatically in reaction to the French Revolution; Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852), the champion of Italy’s intellectual and cultural “primato” (or preeminence) and of a renewed political Guelphism; Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883) and Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883), who together introduced and “naturalized” Hegel in Italy; and their self-avowed heirs, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), the sponsors and guardians of the so-called idealist “hegemony.” Through a parallel investigation of these thinkers’ work, this chapter shows Italian philosophy to be a Vichianism, that is, an enduring application of Vico’s humanism as it sustains the Italian modern or Risorgimento intellectual’s self-defining confrontation with his Renaissance prototype. Indeed, this chapter argues that Italian intellectual identity (or lack thereof) was founded on a Renaissance “shame,” the Renaissance moment, with its enduring political failures, being the specter that Italy must chase out in order to achieve the “modernity” it heralded but never itself enjoyed.Less
This chapter narrates the emergence of a self-consciously construed Italian philosophical tradition from the time of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century political and cultural unification movement, to the early twentieth century. Among the protagonists of this transgenerational conversation are: Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823), who was the first to turn to the philosophy of Giambattista Vico programmatically in reaction to the French Revolution; Vincenzo Gioberti (1801-1852), the champion of Italy’s intellectual and cultural “primato” (or preeminence) and of a renewed political Guelphism; Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883) and Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883), who together introduced and “naturalized” Hegel in Italy; and their self-avowed heirs, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), the sponsors and guardians of the so-called idealist “hegemony.” Through a parallel investigation of these thinkers’ work, this chapter shows Italian philosophy to be a Vichianism, that is, an enduring application of Vico’s humanism as it sustains the Italian modern or Risorgimento intellectual’s self-defining confrontation with his Renaissance prototype. Indeed, this chapter argues that Italian intellectual identity (or lack thereof) was founded on a Renaissance “shame,” the Renaissance moment, with its enduring political failures, being the specter that Italy must chase out in order to achieve the “modernity” it heralded but never itself enjoyed.
Rocco Rubini
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186139
- eISBN:
- 9780226186276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186276.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter addresses the demise of Giovanni Gentile’s scholarly and philosophical influence during the interwar period. It recounts how Gentile’s stance and agenda came under attack, from the ...
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This chapter addresses the demise of Giovanni Gentile’s scholarly and philosophical influence during the interwar period. It recounts how Gentile’s stance and agenda came under attack, from the Catholic quarter, where his archenemy, Agostino Gemelli, sponsored a Neothomism and thus a renewed medievalism, countering the modern mainstream, and also from within, as some of his former students, in line with European concerns, vociferously called for the “problematization” of Gentile’s actual idealism and the philosophical task tout-court. At the same time, this chapter examines the concerted, indeed, collaborative efforts of a younger generation of existentialists who, relying on smuggled French and German sources, succeeded in definitely overcoming, in critical assimilation, the “hegemony” of Italian idealism. Notable among the latter group of young thinkers given to the “deprovincialization” of Italian philosophy are Enrico Castelli (1900-1977), who, inspired by Maurice Blondel, sponsored a Catholic existentialism and, more influentially, Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990), who, through a newly discovered Heidegger, came to conceive of a distinctively Italian existentialism that would be “positive,” “constructive,” and “civic” as opposed to defeatist and solipsistic. The chapter makes the case that only with this philosophical background in mind can some of the most influential interpretive paradigms in postwar Renaissance scholarship be fully grasped.Less
This chapter addresses the demise of Giovanni Gentile’s scholarly and philosophical influence during the interwar period. It recounts how Gentile’s stance and agenda came under attack, from the Catholic quarter, where his archenemy, Agostino Gemelli, sponsored a Neothomism and thus a renewed medievalism, countering the modern mainstream, and also from within, as some of his former students, in line with European concerns, vociferously called for the “problematization” of Gentile’s actual idealism and the philosophical task tout-court. At the same time, this chapter examines the concerted, indeed, collaborative efforts of a younger generation of existentialists who, relying on smuggled French and German sources, succeeded in definitely overcoming, in critical assimilation, the “hegemony” of Italian idealism. Notable among the latter group of young thinkers given to the “deprovincialization” of Italian philosophy are Enrico Castelli (1900-1977), who, inspired by Maurice Blondel, sponsored a Catholic existentialism and, more influentially, Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990), who, through a newly discovered Heidegger, came to conceive of a distinctively Italian existentialism that would be “positive,” “constructive,” and “civic” as opposed to defeatist and solipsistic. The chapter makes the case that only with this philosophical background in mind can some of the most influential interpretive paradigms in postwar Renaissance scholarship be fully grasped.
Rocco Rubini
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186139
- eISBN:
- 9780226186276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186276.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of ...
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This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of his generation. It tells the story of Garin’s irenic efforts to reconcile the rift in the Italian academy between Gentile’s brand of idealism (philosophy) and the Italian positivistic school (philology) during the Fascist ventennio. As Garin himself suggested, his early scholarship can be read as an exercise in “honest dissimulation,” aspiring, that is, to a covert critique, political and intellectual, of interwar Italy. This trend is visible in Garin’s scholarship in his groundbreaking works on Pico (1937) and the British Enlightenment (1941), and, most famously, in his interpretation of the Renaissance in Italian Humanism (1947), a work originally commissioned by Ernesto Grassi to support the “existential humanism” he was promoting in Germany with the approval (or so he thought) of Heidegger. In this chapter, moreover, Garin’s career provides the context for defining Hans Baron’s interpretation of Quattrocento humanism as a “civic” movement and for reconnecting estranged but strikingly similar philosophers like Gentile and Ernst Cassirer, as well as for understanding the postwar interest in Antonio Gramsci, of whom Garin was an early and enthusiastic reader.Less
This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Eugenio Garin (1909-2004), who, alongside Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller, is considered one of the foremost Renaissance scholars of his generation. It tells the story of Garin’s irenic efforts to reconcile the rift in the Italian academy between Gentile’s brand of idealism (philosophy) and the Italian positivistic school (philology) during the Fascist ventennio. As Garin himself suggested, his early scholarship can be read as an exercise in “honest dissimulation,” aspiring, that is, to a covert critique, political and intellectual, of interwar Italy. This trend is visible in Garin’s scholarship in his groundbreaking works on Pico (1937) and the British Enlightenment (1941), and, most famously, in his interpretation of the Renaissance in Italian Humanism (1947), a work originally commissioned by Ernesto Grassi to support the “existential humanism” he was promoting in Germany with the approval (or so he thought) of Heidegger. In this chapter, moreover, Garin’s career provides the context for defining Hans Baron’s interpretation of Quattrocento humanism as a “civic” movement and for reconnecting estranged but strikingly similar philosophers like Gentile and Ernst Cassirer, as well as for understanding the postwar interest in Antonio Gramsci, of whom Garin was an early and enthusiastic reader.
Rocco Rubini
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186139
- eISBN:
- 9780226186276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186276.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), the doyen of Renaissance studies in postwar American academia. It details Kristeller’s relationship to ...
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This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), the doyen of Renaissance studies in postwar American academia. It details Kristeller’s relationship to his Italian mentor, Giovanni Gentile, and to rival academics during his exile in Italy in the 1930s, as well as his indebtedness to his German mentors and peers. These included Hans Baron, whose epistolary dialogue with Kristeller helped interest the latter in the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino; Martin Heidegger, who influenced his appreciation for existential concerns; and, especially, Heinrich Rickert, whose brand of Neokantianism was instrumental, the chapter shows, in shaping Kristeller’s influential view of Renaissance humanism as “rhetoric” rather than “philosophy.” The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debate concerning the scientific value of the Geisteswissenschaften provides an additional context for Kristeller’s scholarship: this dispute pitted Rickert against the German historicist tradition that runs from Johann Gustav Droysen to Wilhelm Dilthey, and was favored by Eugenio Garin. With this context in mind, the chapter invites a new understanding of the fundamental disagreement between Garin and Kristeller that defined Renaissance studies; it also aims to transcend that disagreement by revealing that the two scholars were united in making Renaissance scholarship a philosophical discourse in its own right.Less
This chapter reviews and contextualizes the early career of Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999), the doyen of Renaissance studies in postwar American academia. It details Kristeller’s relationship to his Italian mentor, Giovanni Gentile, and to rival academics during his exile in Italy in the 1930s, as well as his indebtedness to his German mentors and peers. These included Hans Baron, whose epistolary dialogue with Kristeller helped interest the latter in the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino; Martin Heidegger, who influenced his appreciation for existential concerns; and, especially, Heinrich Rickert, whose brand of Neokantianism was instrumental, the chapter shows, in shaping Kristeller’s influential view of Renaissance humanism as “rhetoric” rather than “philosophy.” The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debate concerning the scientific value of the Geisteswissenschaften provides an additional context for Kristeller’s scholarship: this dispute pitted Rickert against the German historicist tradition that runs from Johann Gustav Droysen to Wilhelm Dilthey, and was favored by Eugenio Garin. With this context in mind, the chapter invites a new understanding of the fundamental disagreement between Garin and Kristeller that defined Renaissance studies; it also aims to transcend that disagreement by revealing that the two scholars were united in making Renaissance scholarship a philosophical discourse in its own right.
Ramsey McGlazer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286591
- eISBN:
- 9780823288809
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286591.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter reads Giovanni Pascoli’s boarding school idyll Paedagogium, a poem written in Latin in 1903, alongside his educational writings, including the essay “Pensieri scolastici,” made famous by ...
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This chapter reads Giovanni Pascoli’s boarding school idyll Paedagogium, a poem written in Latin in 1903, alongside his educational writings, including the essay “Pensieri scolastici,” made famous by Giorgio Agamben. In his reading of the essay Agamben abstracts the fanciullino, the small child privileged in Pascoli’s poetics, from the contexts in which the poet wrote and taught, making this child into the bearer of a “voice” prior to any and every particular instance of human speech. This reading has the advantage of drawing our attention to Pascoli’s striking claim that “the language of poetry is always a dead language.” The chapter contends, however, that Agamben obscures the things that Pascoli’s poetry does with “dead language.” The chapter returns Pascoli’s “Pensieri scolastici” to the context of its first publication: a journal for schoolteachers in which Pascoli warned of threats to the old school, but also to poetry and thought as such. Against such threats, and opposing Giovanni Gentile’s pedagogical philosophy, Paedagogium calls for the preservation of the past in its difference from the present and of the dead language in its difference from the living. Pascoli thus turns out not to celebrate, but rather to take instructive distance from, the nation.Less
This chapter reads Giovanni Pascoli’s boarding school idyll Paedagogium, a poem written in Latin in 1903, alongside his educational writings, including the essay “Pensieri scolastici,” made famous by Giorgio Agamben. In his reading of the essay Agamben abstracts the fanciullino, the small child privileged in Pascoli’s poetics, from the contexts in which the poet wrote and taught, making this child into the bearer of a “voice” prior to any and every particular instance of human speech. This reading has the advantage of drawing our attention to Pascoli’s striking claim that “the language of poetry is always a dead language.” The chapter contends, however, that Agamben obscures the things that Pascoli’s poetry does with “dead language.” The chapter returns Pascoli’s “Pensieri scolastici” to the context of its first publication: a journal for schoolteachers in which Pascoli warned of threats to the old school, but also to poetry and thought as such. Against such threats, and opposing Giovanni Gentile’s pedagogical philosophy, Paedagogium calls for the preservation of the past in its difference from the present and of the dead language in its difference from the living. Pascoli thus turns out not to celebrate, but rather to take instructive distance from, the nation.
Ramsey McGlazer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286591
- eISBN:
- 9780823288809
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286591.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This introduction indicates the book’s historical and theoretical coordinates and lays out its argument. The introduction proposes “counter-progressive pedagogy” as the name for a series of ...
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This introduction indicates the book’s historical and theoretical coordinates and lays out its argument. The introduction proposes “counter-progressive pedagogy” as the name for a series of surprising, often paradoxical engagements with the “old school” in modernist literature and cinema. Noting that this pedagogy characterizes the work of the figures treated in the book’s chapters—Pater, Pascoli, Joyce, Pasolini, and Rocha—the introduction also provides counter-examples from other literary and cinematic traditions, both realist and modernist. Finding a theoretical precedent and point of departure in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the introduction discusses Gramsci’s analysis of fascist educational reforms. In its effort to modernize Italian schools and shed the dead weight of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as outmoded, rote, and repetitive “instruction,” the fascist regime espoused progressive educational principles. Gramsci’s response to this co-optation or crux—this convergence of fascist policy and progressive theory—is instructive. Whereas Gentile sought “the liberation of the school from mechanism,” Gramsci deemed such liberation impossible. But like the other counter-progressive figures treated in Old Schools, he shows that the old school’s repetition, discipline, and even deadness—as in the deadness of the Latin language—can be radically recast and set to work to critical ends.Less
This introduction indicates the book’s historical and theoretical coordinates and lays out its argument. The introduction proposes “counter-progressive pedagogy” as the name for a series of surprising, often paradoxical engagements with the “old school” in modernist literature and cinema. Noting that this pedagogy characterizes the work of the figures treated in the book’s chapters—Pater, Pascoli, Joyce, Pasolini, and Rocha—the introduction also provides counter-examples from other literary and cinematic traditions, both realist and modernist. Finding a theoretical precedent and point of departure in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the introduction discusses Gramsci’s analysis of fascist educational reforms. In its effort to modernize Italian schools and shed the dead weight of what Giovanni Gentile disparaged as outmoded, rote, and repetitive “instruction,” the fascist regime espoused progressive educational principles. Gramsci’s response to this co-optation or crux—this convergence of fascist policy and progressive theory—is instructive. Whereas Gentile sought “the liberation of the school from mechanism,” Gramsci deemed such liberation impossible. But like the other counter-progressive figures treated in Old Schools, he shows that the old school’s repetition, discipline, and even deadness—as in the deadness of the Latin language—can be radically recast and set to work to critical ends.
Matthew Gibson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This two-part essay employs A Vision’s consistent division between time and space to observe how W. B. Yeats’s reading of philosophy from 1925 onwards shaped his understanding of the ontological ...
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This two-part essay employs A Vision’s consistent division between time and space to observe how W. B. Yeats’s reading of philosophy from 1925 onwards shaped his understanding of the ontological basis of the Principles and of the Thirteenth Cone’s achronic nature, and to demonstrate the importance of early anthropology and “civilisation theory” for understanding the different phases of the wheel at its macroscopic level. Beginning with Yeats’s use of Giovanni Gentile and George Berkeley articulate the soul’s growth and perception, the first part then discusses the role of J. W. Dunne and J. M. E. McTaggart in helping Yeats to articulate the Thirteenth Cone as a set of individual, ever-simultaneous “selves.” The second part observes the contributions by the likes of Strzygowski, Schneider, Petrie, and Spengler to Yeats’s depiction of the 26,000-year Magnus Annus, demonstrating that the division between time and space, as aspects of subjective and objective-minded civilisations respectively, is also important at a historical level.Less
This two-part essay employs A Vision’s consistent division between time and space to observe how W. B. Yeats’s reading of philosophy from 1925 onwards shaped his understanding of the ontological basis of the Principles and of the Thirteenth Cone’s achronic nature, and to demonstrate the importance of early anthropology and “civilisation theory” for understanding the different phases of the wheel at its macroscopic level. Beginning with Yeats’s use of Giovanni Gentile and George Berkeley articulate the soul’s growth and perception, the first part then discusses the role of J. W. Dunne and J. M. E. McTaggart in helping Yeats to articulate the Thirteenth Cone as a set of individual, ever-simultaneous “selves.” The second part observes the contributions by the likes of Strzygowski, Schneider, Petrie, and Spengler to Yeats’s depiction of the 26,000-year Magnus Annus, demonstrating that the division between time and space, as aspects of subjective and objective-minded civilisations respectively, is also important at a historical level.
Rocco Rubini
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186139
- eISBN:
- 9780226186276
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186276.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This book provides an overdue cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian ...
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This book provides an overdue cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian philosophy to have emerged during the age of the Risorgimento in reaction to eighteenth-century French revolutionary and rationalist standards in politics and philosophy and in critical assimilation of the German reaction to the same, mainly Hegelian idealism and, eventually, Heideggerian existentialism. Specifically, this is the story of modern Italian philosophy told through the lens of Renaissance scholarship. It introduces Anglo-American readers to Italian philosophy as it reflected a Renaissance precedent it wished to enliven, reactivate, and improve in support or criticism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century upheavals: unity (Risorgimento), empire (Fascism), and democracy (Republicanism). This Renaissance or humanist focus clarifies the Italian philosophical “difference” vis-à-vis the main strands of Continental philosophy (French, German, and their American elaborations), a “difference” that, perhaps to our advantage today, sheltered Italian inquiry from the self-confuting framework of the postmodern moment. By identifying the presence of Renaissance humanism in modern philosophical thought and in the scholarship of Bertrando Spaventa, Giovanni Gentile, Ernesto Grassi, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, among others, The Italians' Renaissance recovers a tradition in Renaissance studies that runs parallel to, and separately from, the one initiated by Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). In so doing it calls for a renewed dialogue between students of philosophy and of the Renaissance, a dialogue that would prevent the study of the origins of modernity from turning into a form of antiquarianism.Less
This book provides an overdue cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian philosophy to have emerged during the age of the Risorgimento in reaction to eighteenth-century French revolutionary and rationalist standards in politics and philosophy and in critical assimilation of the German reaction to the same, mainly Hegelian idealism and, eventually, Heideggerian existentialism. Specifically, this is the story of modern Italian philosophy told through the lens of Renaissance scholarship. It introduces Anglo-American readers to Italian philosophy as it reflected a Renaissance precedent it wished to enliven, reactivate, and improve in support or criticism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century upheavals: unity (Risorgimento), empire (Fascism), and democracy (Republicanism). This Renaissance or humanist focus clarifies the Italian philosophical “difference” vis-à-vis the main strands of Continental philosophy (French, German, and their American elaborations), a “difference” that, perhaps to our advantage today, sheltered Italian inquiry from the self-confuting framework of the postmodern moment. By identifying the presence of Renaissance humanism in modern philosophical thought and in the scholarship of Bertrando Spaventa, Giovanni Gentile, Ernesto Grassi, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, among others, The Italians' Renaissance recovers a tradition in Renaissance studies that runs parallel to, and separately from, the one initiated by Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). In so doing it calls for a renewed dialogue between students of philosophy and of the Renaissance, a dialogue that would prevent the study of the origins of modernity from turning into a form of antiquarianism.