academics-from-italy

"(About the deaths of Ilaria Alpi and Miran Hrovatin) They were on vacation in Somalia; they were not conducting any investigation: the Commission has established this (January 2004)."

"(About the case of Eluana Englaro) A genuine murder has taken place. [Even] Parliament itself has been taken for a ride. My complaint would have been for attempted murder; now it will be different—namely, premeditated murder. And it will be filed against the girl’s father Beppino Englaro, against the doctors who treated her, and also against the Public Prosecutor of Udine for abuse of office or for whatever crimes may be identified. As for the prosecutor in Udine, who has been completely inactive, I will request the intervention of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Milan, which has jurisdiction over crimes committed by the judges in Udine. This barbaric murder, this attack on life, must be punished and brought to justice."

"I worked for years for Berlusconi; I know his strategies. When I was his legal advisor and he asked me to draft laws that would protect him from the magistrates, he certainly made no secret of their ad personam purpose. And I drafted them even better than Ghedini and Pecorella do now. The one on legitimate suspicion—I think it was 2002—he needed to move his trials from Milan to Rome. He asked us for it openly, and we, faithful executors of the prince’s will, set about writing it. And we did a pretty good job, I must say: everything seemed in order. Then one evening in late October, around 11 p.m., a call came from Ciampi. I told Berlusconi that with that amendment, it wouldn’t serve any purpose anymore. He thought about it for a moment and then replied: “Let’s do it this way for now, and we’ll see.” I was right: in fact, the law passed with those amendments and was of no use to him."

"(Regarding the secret dossier on Ilaria Alpi) I have absolutely no recollection of having given that document to the then-Chief of Police, and I certainly did not grant any investigative authority to Gianni De Gennaro."

"There are many things I did during that period that I would never do again. I have no qualms about saying that I went through a moral crisis, which culminated when I saw how the Cavaliere's inner circle was taking shape."

"[About the Telekom Serbia case] I confess: I am the puppet master behind this whole affair. I am turning myself in for complicity in slander with Paoletti, Marini, and Pintus. [I] have created difficulties for Forza Italia and Berlusconi. [It is therefore right] that I withdraw from political life. I have made a grave mistake, and this is an open confession; it is right that I make a public apology; I acknowledge that Repubblica is staffed by first-rate journalists. I am making a serious announcement: I will resign as a member of parliament in the coming days. Through the various schemes outlined by Repubblica and my ties to figures such as D’Andria, Fracassi, Di Bari, and even Francesco Pazienza—all linked in the public imagination to rogue intelligence agencies and international fraud and money laundering—I succeeded in making the Telekom Serbia Commission the target of a poisoned chalice. I take full responsibility for the individuals who, by implicating Prodi, Dini, and Fassino, have seriously slandered them; and I accuse myself of complicity in slander, though I hope Repubblica does the same, because while I accuse myself, I would like to know from D’Avanzo and Bonini who their puppet masters were at the time and whom they now serve. Repubblica is right, I cannot sue!"

"He was probably the most respected man of his time and even more beloved than respected."

"Morgagni enjoyed an unequalled popularity among all classes."

"The plague is a metaphor for evil. Of evil that comes from outside, or from above, like the arrows shot by Apollo at the Greeks leaving for Troy. But also, and above all, of evil that arises and grows within us. Within the world and from the world. Rooted in that nature that both envelops us and constitutes us as finite, fragile beings, exposed to the icy wind of death."

"But the question of the plague—in its not only pathological but also moral, ontological, and metaphysical meaning—had already been raised by Lucretius and, before him, by Anaximander. The plague is destiny, but also, when measured by ethical standards, the fault of a man who, being part of nature, shares its evil or, at least, senseless character."

"Recalcati reconstructs in all its facets the development, far from linear, of a thought, such as that of Lacan, formed at the point of convergence and tension between existentialism and structuralism, capable of absorbing, translating them into a highly original mixture, the influences of Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre and Kojève, Saussurre and Jakobson – not to mention Freud, who remained his privileged interlocutor until the end."

"There is no real escape from this vortex. The only way to become immune to the plague is to expose oneself to its contagion. But this inevitably means becoming prey to it in an endless cycle. The plague generates itself, reproducing tirelessly, despite and precisely because of attempts to eradicate it—in reality, hiding it, crushing it against the fragile wall of oblivion and repression. Humanity is nothing more than that thin strip of land that stretches between one wave of the plague and another – emerging into the open only when the tide recedes, before rising again and submerging us once more. That in some seasons the plague – this plague in man and of man – disappears, recedes, vanishes, is our impression. It has always been there, lurking, waiting to return and explode stronger than before, like the dark shadow that stretched across the burning heart of Western civilization in the 1930s."

"Muratori really proved himself to be a universal genius of rare calibre, at home in all fields of human knowledge. He showed extraordinary qualities as priest and man; he was zealous in the ministry, charitable to the poor, and diligent in visiting the abandoned and imprisoned."

"A major challenge in deploying ML-based systems, such as ML-based computer vision, is the inherent difficulty in ensuring their performance in the operational design domain. The standard approach consists in extensively testing models against a wide collection of inputs. However, testing is inherently limited in coverage, and it is expensive in several domains."

"To provide guarantees, we’ll of course perform extensive testing. This will give us some confidence about the way in which the vehicle will behave over a broad range of standard and corner cases. But testing is necessarily incomplete however extensive our testing, it can never be exhaustive. There are only a finite amount of situations one can test."

"The general public will experience the car as a vehicle that performs journeys on our cities’ roads, getting people from A to B quickly and affordably. But, under the proverbial bonnet, there will be plenty more going on. These are not cars as we’ve known them. They’re autonomous in the sense that the car will be taking a number of decisions independently during the journey."

"I’m here to help Five tackle the challenge of verifying autonomous vehicles. I have a clear aim: to help Five find ways of giving guarantees that Five’s cars are safe, so passengers can step inside the vehicle knowing it will do no harm to them or those around them."

"With this in mind, we need to think about how we can give guarantees that the actions the vehicle will perform are safe with respect to its integrity and the environment. Let’s remember that we do not only have to consider the passengers but also the environment, which will be diverse and complex, encompassing other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, buildings, weather conditions, and more."

""I want to be a living work of art," declared the Marchesa Casati. And she succeeded. Her body became a statue. Her face a painting. Her conversation a performance. She had not clothes but costumes. (p. 32)"

"(About Mata Hari) The painters she posed for were disappointed by her small breasts, and she was often forced into prostitution. She had much better luck when she decided to perform as an exotic dancer. Undaunted by her ignorance and unpreparedness, she began introducing herself as Lady Gresha MacLeod. She claimed to be the daughter of an Indian priestess and to have grown up in a Shiva temple. [...] Her decision to perform only in private homes, probably the only possible choice given her technical unpreparedness, had accentuated the exotic aura of mystery she loved to surround herself with. Less demanding than artists, high society was struck by this tall, slender woman, with lively, burning eyes beneath her mass of dark hair. A witness recalled her superb figure and her noble, simple, and personality-filled bearing. She was the embodiment of the femme fatales that crowded the paintings and novels of the time; she was Gustave Moreau's half-naked, bejeweled Salomé."

"Her masked balls were triumphs. One night she chose the entire Piazza San Marco as her salon. She could appear dressed as Cagliostro or a serpent, or walk naked in the garden, candidly explaining: "I am the Truth!" But even nudity was a costume for her. (p. 33)"

"Luisa Casati masterfully played the "femme fatale," hypnotizing men with her bold balance of the black abyss of her gaze and the white of her nudity. But she ruined no lover. No one committed suicide on her doorstep. Aside from the never-ending affair with il Poet, her love affairs remained on the fringes of her exceptional existence. (p. 33)"

"Cornelio Fabro essentially drew on Thomas Aquinas, while someone like Bontadini was first and foremost a follower of Giovanni Gentile."

"Between being and nothingness there is no middle ground."

"A generic humanitarian sentiment can lead to peace as well as war, to oppression as well as freedom, to violence as well as resignation."

"The thirst for knowledge is there, we know this from many signs: everything that can contribute to satisfying it, even if by modest means and to a modest extent, must be considered providential and cultivated with care."

"Philosophy, in the great turning point that the history of the human spirit is undergoing today, seems called upon to take responsibility for the new form of humanism that is imposing itself."

"Educators must know how to measure the weight of what they promote."

"If it fails in this commitment to penetrate the human, to spread socially, philosophy has missed the opportunity offered to it by the times."

"For Plato, the soul was something that entered the body and left it at the moment of death. For the pre-Socratics, it was a kind of spectre. Aristotle, as many know, defines the soul as the form, or the first act of the body. We need to reflect on the concept of form; form is not a part of the organism, which has its own unity. Organisms are bodies capable of performing certain functions; these capacities are obviously reduced in plants, while in animals they are already more complex. In human beings, we find activities that we call superior, such as thinking and willing. The soul is the possession of these capacities."

"Interviewer: So today society is more in need of philosophy than ever... Professor Berti: Not only today, but always. Philosophy is in fact inherent in human nature; it has always existed and will always exist, despite attempts to decree its end. This was not only the thinking of Aristotle, for whom “all human beings by nature (i.e. males and females, free and slaves, Greeks and barbarians) desire knowledge”, and philosophy – if rightly understood – is the highest form of knowledge. Already in the Apology, Plato has Socrates say that ‘a life without inquiry is not worth living for a human being’."

"Philosophy and metaphysics are notorious because of the endless disputes that have always devastated them."

"(Citing the Metaphysics of Aristotle) ‘The good and the beautiful are different because the former is always in praxis, while the latter is also in immovable things.’ [...] For Aristotle, a true good must be achievable through practice. Beauty, on the other hand, is not always achievable; there is one aspect of beauty that is achievable, which is achievable through practice and is therefore an action, but there is clearly another aspect of beauty that is not achievable and which places it in the realm of immutable realities, i.e. realities that do not depend on human action. [...] “Beauty is always order, symmetry and determinacy”. [...] These characteristics – according to Aristotle – also belong to immobile realities such as mathematical objects. Mathematical objects are beautiful because they are orderly, symmetrical and determinate. Think of geometric figures, think of geometric theorems. Mathematicians themselves say today that a theorem, a proof, can be beautiful, can be elegant. And this confirms Aristotle's idea of beauty as belonging to immutable realities. Mathematical objects are not practicable, they cannot be realised through action; they are there, they must be described, they must be proven, but they are not the product of our action, so they are immutable realities, but that is why they are beautiful. [...] For Aristotle, there are many goods: for example, health is a good, strength is a good, wealth is a good. Therefore, many human actions have these goods as their end. [...] However, some actions are good because they procure goods, but they are not beautiful actions, there is no reason to consider them beautiful."

"I would like to say to them, both students and teachers: being able to meet to talk about philosophy, literature, art, religion and science, as we do at school, is a blessing, a great blessing. For students and young people, for example, it is perhaps the best time of their lives, an opportunity that brings us into contact with values, ideas and the best things that humanity has produced. And I would remind teachers that our profession is, in many ways, one of the most beautiful. We are fortunate. But it is a profession that allows us to remain in contact with young people, with science, with art, with literature, with everything that makes up culture, throughout our lives. So, I believe we should consider ourselves fortunate."

"More than finalism (which in Aristotle concerns only internal finality), Christian theology owes to Aristotle the concept of a transcendent and personal Principle, which in Aristotle is the first among the immobile motors of the heavens, and therefore the first of beings and the motor of everything, while for Christians (as for Muslims) it is God. However, we must bear in mind the different meaning that the word “god” had for the ancients and has for believers in monotheistic religions. For the ancients (Greeks and Romans), ‘god’ is a common noun, the name of a species of living beings, like ‘man’, and is therefore written with an article and a lowercase initial letter (the god). For monotheists (Jews, Christians, Muslims), however, ‘God’ is the name of a single person, so it is written without an article and with a capital letter. These are grammatical rules, not ideological choices."

"What Christians consider to be Aristotle's “God”, i.e. the first unmoved mover – which for Aristotle is ‘a god’ because it is an immortal and happy living being – is not creator, it is not providential, and above all it is not a saviour. However, like the Christian God, it is transcendent and personal. Its transcendence is expressed by its immutability, which distinguishes it from every other reality we experience. His personality, on the other hand, is due to the fact that he thinks, therefore lives, and is happy to think, therefore possesses a will. However, I believe it is wrong to compare a philosophical doctrine, conquered by a man through exclusively human abilities (experience and reasoning), with a concept that is the result of divine revelation."

"I began studying Aristotle when I was still a student here in Padua. When I decided to write my thesis, I approached a professor who seemed particularly interesting to me, Marino Gentile. I told him about my interests, which centred on the debate on metaphysics, in particular the objections that contemporary philosophy raised against metaphysics, represented by major currents such as Marxism, existentialism and positivism, which were hostile to metaphysics. The professor advised me to read Aristotle's Metaphysics, a text I had already read for some university exams. Reading it, I realised that there were still many things to be clarified, even though Aristotle was considered by my colleagues to be an outdated philosopher. Perhaps this was also due to the cultural isolation that Italy suffered as a result of the war and the presence of the historicism of Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce. In other European countries, he was still a relevant philosopher, especially in English philosophy, within the context of reflection on everyday language; English scholars continually discussed Aristotle. In Germany, Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the last century, devoted a great deal of attention to Aristotle. Over time, I continued to study Aristotle, discovering more and more how relevant he was. Today, Aristotle is one of the most studied philosophers in the world and is considered an interlocutor, in contrast to those currents that are now almost obsolete."

"At first, I was greatly influenced by the Aristotelian tradition, represented by the Islamic and Christian worlds, a tradition in which Aristotle was the philosopher of those who wanted to give a philosophical basis to those who had a religious faith. Later, I realised that Aristotle did not have this problem at all; Aristotle's interest was exclusively scientific, leading him to deal with areas that have become our current sciences, and to question concepts such as cause, a concept much broader than how we conceive it on a daily basis."

"According to Aristotle, true happiness consists in doing the things we enjoy most with our friends. [...] Those who love philosophy love above all else to philosophise (in Greek: sum-philosophein) with their friends."

"Aristotle, like all the ancients, was a polytheist, that is, he believed in a plurality of gods, and “practised” his religion, that is, he prayed to the gods and made vows, as can be seen from his will. However, he criticised the anthropomorphic aspects of polytheism, interpreting the gods as the driving forces of the heavens, and recognised a “first” among them, thus paving the way, later taken up by the Stoics, towards monotheism."

"Philosophy looks at reality, and is therefore theory, but it looks at it as it relates to the choice of ends and therefore to practical commitment."

"[...] philosophy is like the horizon, which can shift here and there, but, as a horizon, is always there."

"Interviewer: What brings Aristotle closer to Lucretius' statement, “Happy is he who can know the causes of things”? Professor Berti: This is a point that has perhaps not yet been adequately explored because Lucretius was known to be an Epicurean, and Epicureans in ancient times were generally hostile to Aristotle and polemical towards him. Most of the anti-Aristotelian anecdotes preserved in history are of Epicurean origin. Nevertheless, Lucretius, the great Epicurean poet and philosopher, while sharing Epicurus' belief that happiness consists in pleasure – what he calls in Latin “'voluptas”', with which he begins his poem “'De Rerum Natura”' – Lucretius himself states that happy is he who has been able to know the causes of things. Therefore, this pleasure, this happiness, which is clearly an intellectual pleasure, includes knowledge of the causes, that is, the ability to explain phenomena and solve the problems that experience presents us with. And this is ultimately a trait shared by all great philosophers, but also – I would say – by all philosophers, all those who love philosophy, that is, the desire to know, the happiness that comes from solving problems and discovering the causes of why things happen."

"All disciplines have being as their ultimate material object; but it must be said that metaphysics has it as its formal object."

"Could evil, sin, catastrophe, and even drugs be the occasional material that God offers to men so that they can somehow see, feel, and understand him?"

"I am the first to recognise this. When I began to develop this way of thinking – but let's go back a long way – I was the first to realise that I should leave that university. Interviewer: However, you never broke off your personal relationship or esteem for your teacher, Gustavo Bontadini? Emanuele Severino: We loved each other, and I still get emotional when I think about it. I remember when he was in his last days... ah, what a dear man... I went to see him in Via Stradella – he lived in Via Stradella, near Corso Buenos Aires – and I said to him: “Maestro, I am Emanuele Severino”. He, who had not opened his eyes for days, gave a start and opened his arms to me. We embraced for a long time. Then he let go of my arms and I left him."

"I haven't changed my opinion on gay people. Politically and legally, I am in favour of non-discrimination, but morally, I think what the Catholic Church thinks: homosexuality is a moral disorder. If God gave you a male body, you can never be a woman. You can never get pregnant. And pretending to be something you are not makes you feel bad; you lose your life in exchange for a fiction."

"Silvio sincerely loved his wife, and the break-up was a profound trauma that he tried to overcome in the worst possible way. Bunga bunga was his response to the pain. I heard him talk about Veronica: he didn't see her as a sexual object, she was the woman of his life, the mother of his children..."

"By signing the motion of no confidence in the Berlusconi government together with Bossi, Buttiglione has shown himself to be a double-dealing fool."

"I'm better at wooing than Berlusconi: I can prove it to you."