Salvatore Veca

"(About Giorgio Gaber and Sandro Luporini) They were free from labels and classifications, far removed from the laziness of common discourse. By “renaming”, they forced us to take a step forward. Towards a world that must be rediscovered, as the ‘Canzone dell'appartenenza’ (Song of Belonging) said. Towards reasons that have been lost or dissipated, towards a clarity made opaque by the standardisation of thought."

"Gaber and Luporini [...] attempt to achieve a clear understanding of the transformations of which they are both observers and participants. And the desire that drives their attempt is, of course, to communicate this understanding to an audience. Which, in the context of a theatrical event, means first building an audience."

"Our relationship with truth has something to do with our relationship with each other and with the world."

"The neutrality of sociometry conceals a precise ideology: psychology is thus in a typical situation of “objectification” and of a loss of intentionality and meaning in its theoretical operations and practices; it provides a typical example of the “forgetting of meaning” referred to by Husserl in “The Crisis” [...] The need for a genetic investigation that reveals the intersubjective root of neurosis, reacting to the “solipsistic” danger of psychoanalysis, remains the most interesting and valid aspect of Moreno's research. [...] The intersubjectivity that Moreno wishes to assert in diagnosis and therapy reveals itself to be an abstract intersubjectivity, or, as we would say in phenomenological language, unfounded."

"Concrete subjectivity must be able to use its expressive techniques in their entirety: gestures, words and body movements are the appropriate tools for this therapeutic process. Moreno considers the body to be an “'organ d'expression, porteur d'intentions”'."

"Reading and rereading these pages by Robert Nozick we can feel that “'his”' philosophy accompanies us, with luminous intelligence, sensitivity and friendship, in “'our”' examined life."

"The individual, whose fundamental characteristic for Moreno is spontaneity-creativity, aligns himself with the role: when a conflict arises, more or less consciously, between the subject and the role, between the individual and the given model, illness, anxiety and neurosis arise."

"(With the COVID-19 pandemic) We have gone from a city [Milan] that fed on its own light, conquered with Expo, to this desert that invades, as Stefano Boeri would say, its squares. We are in the “'Wasteland”' of Eliot."

"I am convinced that the theory of contemporary democracy must respond to the dilemmas that arise in a changed world, which is simply our own. And I wonder what interpretation of democratic freedom is most appropriate for this purpose, if this purpose is shared. The question now is this: what grammar of freedom, in times of internal unrest within democracy and external hostility towards democracy?"

"In the now extensive and equally varied literature on animal rights, Tom Regan's book [...] occupies a special and prominent place. “'The Case for Animal Rights”' is one of the few attempts to systematise and formulate a broader philosophical theory within which arguments in favour of moral reasons take on their specific meaning. These arguments support, inform and dictate what should be the right treatments, actions, institutions and social practices that involve and affect the relationships between us, human animals, and our fellow travellers in the adventure or odyssey of evolution, non-human animals. (p. 7)"

"Inaugurated in 1975 by Peter Singer“s famous pamphlet, ”'Animal Liberation“”, philosophical research into our duties towards animals, the moral rights to be ascribed to them, how it is right to treat them, and which practices — economic, scientific, technological—are consistent with the principles of a normative ethic that includes among its “clients” the grandchildren of Bentham and Kant as much as those of Fido or Pluto, is now vast. (p. 7)"

"Many women and men participate in movements whose main purpose is to minimise suffering and cruelty and to maximise respect for and protection of animal rights. They take a stand against institutions and practices dictated by cruelty or injustice. (p. 8)"

"Tom Regan's book is a passionate, rigorous and accurate philosophical attempt to formulate a comprehensive normative theory that sheds the most lucid light on the reasons that militate in favour of treatments, practices and institutions modelled on (and consistent with) the principle of equal respect due, for strict reasons of justice, to our fellow travellers on earth, non-human animals. (p. 9)"

"I believe that thoughtful men and women, willing to examine the issues of their own lives and those of our fellow travellers on earth, should in any case be grateful to philosophers such as Tom Regan for their commitment, scientific integrity and passion for something that has to do with what we can still call, in our forms of communal living, possible “progress” in ethics. (p. 12)"