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Tell us about yourself: where do you come from, what do you teach at Ca' Foscari University, what are your interests and areas of research?
My name is Giuseppe Bianco. I was born in the province of Gorizia and spent the first twenty-five years of my life there. I have been teaching History of Philosophy at Ca' Foscari University since March 2021. I focus on the History of Philosophy and of Human and Life Sciences. For the past decade, I have introduced some sociological methods to my way of analysing the history of thought. I have worked on the history of concepts, problems, authors, texts, intellectual clusters, chairs, educational systems and, in general, cultural objects that have to do with philosophy. I am finishing a book on Gilles Deleuze, and next year I will start a project on the history of international philosophy conferences between the early 20^th century and the post-World War II period.

What is your academic background?fter graduating in Trieste and completing a Master’s Degree in Paris 8, I defended a PhD thesis on Bergson's fortune in Lille 3. I then spent more than a decade teaching and researching in Europe and America. I worked on the French philosophy of the 50s and 60s at the ENS in Paris, Biopolitics at the University of Warwick, Canguilhem and Historical Epistemology at the IEA in Paris, methods in Intellectual History and Historical Sociology at NYU, Deleuze at the USP in São Paulo and the ULB in Brussels, Bioethics and the History of Medicine at Lyon 3, and finally, for the last two years, the History of Life Philosophy as it relates to the Life Sciences at the University of Ghent.

What are your professional reference points?
It is no secret that my favourite author and intellectual probity model is Pierre Bourdieu, who unfortunately is not a philosopher tout court; however, I think he is a valuable guide for a 'non-Euclidean' historian of philosophy. In general, I admire authors – epistemologists, sociologists, historians of philosophy, historians in general – whose writings manage to clearly explain something that could not be explained before, without resorting to gratuitous erudition, prophetic or grandiloquent tones, neologisms, or even literary virtuosity, which are true scientific plagues, especially in philosophy.

What is an area that you have always wanted to deal with but have not yet had the opportunity to explore?Although I am fascinated by some German and Austrian authors (Weber, Cassirer or Zilsel), I am not as familiar with German-speaking Philosophy as I am with French, and my German is very bad, which sometimes embarrasses me. Fortunately, scanners, pdfs and machine translations are available! I would like to be more proficient in logic, semiology and analytical philosophy. I have promised myself to make up for some of these shortcomings and, in addition, to acquire – during the next three years of research funded by a European grant – a more solid training in the Sociology of Philosophy, including quantitative methods in my training (lexicometry, multiple correspondence analysis, network study). We'll see.

What is the aspect you are most passionate about in your field of research?
Being able to explain through clearly defined models applied to data and texts (even better if unpublished) what is usually attributed to the genius of an author or the 'natural' development of 'currents', thereby increasing knowledge of cultural history. It brings me great pleasure whenever I manage to bring a 'great classic' down from its pedestal (at least a few inches), showing that without a multitude of other forgotten authors, without intricate intellectual interactions and without complex legitimising operations, the author would not have become a 'great author'. If I can then communicate this passion to students and provoke some interest in them, then my job has meaning.