Vittorio d'Anna is a professor of the history of contemporary
philosophy at the department of philosophy and communication at
Bologna University.
He is also the director of the "Dianoia" magazine.
His studies are focused on both Italian and German
philosophy.
His focus of interest is the monograph entitled Kant in
Italia. Letture della Critica della ragion pura
1860-1940 is based on the idea that we cannot speak of a true
and proper neokantism in Italy.
As far as German philosophy is concerned, he dealt firstly with
Simmel's works on which he wrote two monographs both entitled
Georg Simmel. Dalla filosofia del denaro alla filosofia
della vita , e Il denaro e il "Terzo Regno". The first
monograph provides a complete reconstruction of Simmel's train of
thought regarding early twentieth century philosophy; the second
concerns life as the centre of reflection at the bottom of which
lie hidden messianic instances.
After writing various essays on Scheler, Bloch and Gehlen,
d'Anna concentrated on philosophical anthropology and in a
monograph about Gehlen entitled,L'uomo fra natura e cultura.
Arnold Gehlen e il moderno , he demonstrated how it was
stimulated by classical German philosophy.
He later wrote two monographs on Max Scheler (Max
Scheler. Fenomenologia e spirito del capitalismo e Il
Dio in Tensione. Uomo e mondo della vita nella metafisica di Max
Scheler ). The former focuses on values and the approach to
depravity in the capitalist world, the latter focuses on the
recovery of metaphysics within a movement of development in the
ontological sense of phenomenology. Moreover, d'Anna translated two
of Scheler's essays on love and phenomenology into Italian.
Of recent publication is the monograph of Herbert Marcuse: Il positivo nella filosofia negativa (2016). It is based on the idea of Marcuse’s thought, critical, and mainly negative. This thought should be switched in a positive philosophy, in the sense that happiness it is last condition to obtain because, essentially given, from the beginning it is the base of existence.
At present, he is turning his attention towards the school of
Frankfurt: in particular to Marcuse and Adorno
