00961 - History of Philosophy (A-L)

Academic Year 2024/2025

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: First cycle degree programme (L) in Philosophy (cod. 9216)

Learning outcomes

Students learn to become familiar with trends, issues, important authors of modern philosophy, and to orient themselves in its historical interpretations. They are trained in the critical reading of philosophical texts, and in evaluation of argumentative and rhetorical strategies.

Course contents

From the morality of virtue to the morality of duty. Aristotle and Kant compared.

The course focuses on reflection about morality as practiced between antiquity and modernity. In the background are sometimes profoundly different conceptions of human nature and social life which do not allow to be superimposed through easy readings such as to cancel the historically conditioned character of the meditation of this or that thinker. Aristotle and Kant elected as representatives of both eras between continuity and discontinuity.

Readings/Bibliography

1. Compulsory readings:

Aristotele, Etica Nicomachea. Testo greco a fronte, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1999.

I. Kant, Fondazione della metafisica dei costumi. Testo tedesco a fronte, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1997.

I. Kant. Idea per una storia universale in prospettiva cosmopolitica. Testo tedesco a fronte, Mimesis, Milano 2015 (for students not attending lessons).

2. Choice of readings (at least two):

S. Bacin, Kant e l'autonomia della volontà. Una tesi filosofica e il suo contesto, Il Mulino, Bologna 2021.

E. Bencivenga. Kant. La razionalità del bene, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2010.

P. Donini, Abitudine e saggezza. Aristotele dall'Etica eudemia all'Etica nicomachea, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria 2014.

I. Düring, Aristotele, Mursia, Milano 1976.

A. Fermani, L’etica di Aristotele. Il mondo della vita umana, Morcelliana, Brescia 2021.

L. Fonnesu, Storia dell'etica contemporanea. Da Kant alla filosofia analitica, Carocci, Roma 2018.

L. Fonnesu (a cura di), Etica e mondo in Kant, Il Mulino, Bologna 2008.

O. Hoffe, Kant. Morale, storia, politica, religione, Scholé, Brescia 2018.

C. Natali, La saggezza di Aristotele, Bibliopolis, Napoli 1989.

M. Vegetti, L'etica degli antichi, Laterza Roma-Bari 2010.

E. Weil, Problemi kantiani, Quattroventi, Urbino 2006.

 

3. Institutional Part

Knowledge of the following authors of the history of philosophy between the 16th and 20th centuries will be required for the examination:

Bruno, Machiavelli, Bacone, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Vico, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Croce, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Lukács, Frankfurt School, Foucault, Arendt.

Students can use the textbook they prefer or that they already own, checking that all the authors included in the list below are covered and, if necessary, integrating it with other textbooks. For those who do not already have such texts we suggest:

M. Mori, Storia della filosofia moderna, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2005

A. La Vergata, F. Trabattoni, Filosofia cultura cittadinanza, Rizzoli, Milano, 2011

G. Cambiano, M. Mori, Storia e antologia della filosofia, Laterza, Roma, 1993 e seguenti

F. Cioffi et al., Il testo filosofico, Mondadori, Milano 1992 e seguenti

L. Guidetti, G. Matteucci, Le grammatiche del pensiero, Zanichelli, Bologna, 2012


Students who have already taken an exam on a historical-philosophical topic with prof. Francesco Cerrato or with prof. Diego Donna will not have to take the institutional part of the exam.

Teaching methods

Ex cathedra lessons

Assessment methods

The final oral exam focuses on the programme’s material. The critical evaluation considers the fundamental notions, the level of the analysis and the critical skills. On the basis of these three principal parameters an overall evaluation in thirtieths is expressed.

18-21/30: Sufficient

22-25/30: Average

26-28/30: Good

29-30/30: Very Good

30/30 with praise: Excellent

Teaching tools

Individual lessons may be recorded and made available to students for listening. Students who require specific services and adaptations to teaching activities due to a disability or specific learning disorders (SLD), must first contact the appropriate office: https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en/for-students.

Office hours

See the website of Giovanni Bonacina