PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS (ADVANCED COURSE)

The teaching of Philosophical Hermeneutics is a theoretical discipline and arises when Martin Heidegger, in the first half of the twentieth century, recognizes full philosophical dignity to the issues and phenomena that are part of the previous hermeneutical tradition. It is one of the pillars of contemporary philosophical studies.

The hermeneutical-philosophical approach aims at at least two objectives:
(1) learn to read a classic text with the necessary historiographic awareness and the necessary critical sense of the multiplicity of meanings;
(2) open up the students' cultural horizon in order for them to learn how not to absolutize the present and not to take dominant interpretations as the only possible ones.

As the course will have a specialized tenor, an already consolidated knowledge of Nietzschean thought is assumed.

Nietzsche's Thought of the Eternal Return.

«The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence?'» (The Gay Science, § 341).

F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §§ 285, 310, 340-342;
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, selected parts;
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 56, 240, 277.

One of the following:
1.
Paolo D’Iorio, The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation, in «International Journal for the History of Texts and Ideas», 2(2014), pp. 40-96 [reperibile gratuitamente on-line];
Eric Oger, The eternal return as crucial test, in «Journal of Nietzsche Studies», 14(1997), pp. 1-18;
Keith Ansell Pearson, The Eternal Return of the Overhuman, in «Journal of Nietzsche Studies», 30(2005), pp. 1-21;
2.
Karl Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Return;
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, only the Chapters 2 and 5;
3.
M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, only Book I, part II;
Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and R.J. Hollingdale, The Spirit of Revenge and the Eternal Recurrence: On Heidegger's later interpretation of Nietzsche, in «Journal of Nietzsche Studies», No. 4/5, (Autumn 1992/Spring 1993), pp. 127-153;

The exam consists of a written test with open questions. In the maximum time of two hours students are asked to illustrate and comment on some (four or five) passages taken from the texts in the program.

The lectures will leave room for a seminar course, with direct reading of the texts and programmed reports by the students.

Italian

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