Vincenzo Vitiello

"In philosophy, searching is everything: we search because we are not. It is like the moral imperative: only those who feel they must always continue to act on it actually act on it. The verb of philosophy, as in morality, is not “to be” (sein), but “to ought” (sollen)."

"The philosophical word, in its questioning, always gives voice to the Other, to silence, to death. Its task is to “speak Silence.” The Silence “of” things, “in” things, “in” names, ‘in’ the “sounds” of things [...]. In saying things, the Silence present in the sounds of things, the philosophical word rekindles wonder for the being, the wonder “that the being is.”"

"Interviewer: What is topology? Vincenzo Vitiello: It is a hermeneutic practice rather than a theory. And it is a practice linked to a very personal way of “reading”: it is impossible for me to read Aristotle with eyes other than those with which I read Hegel or Heidegger. There is a contemporaneity in philosophy—but not only in philosophy—that is at the basis of its “history.” As I like to say, by way of example: Hegel is more “contemporary” with Augustine than with Schelling, and the latter is more contemporary with Plotinus than with Hegel – ‘’ en philosophe', of course; because the two – Schelling and Hegel – exchanged friendly letters and fierce criticism between themselves and not with Plotinus and Augustine. The fact is that historical time is constructed in layers; it does not have a single dimension. What Kant considered u'‘ngereimt’', senseless, the contemporaneity of different times, is a fact of experience; ‘'ungereimt’' is only the reduction of every time to the linear succession “past-present-future” of physical-mechanical time. Moreover, it is from Kant that we learn the difference between “moral” time and “physical” time."