This essay places Giacomo Leopardi’s ideas on the relationship between nature and culture in dialogue with Michel Serres’s reflection on the bond between the natural world and humanity as discussed in The Natural Contract. It argues that, in Serresian terms, the social contract for Leopardi coincides initially with a destabilizing break from nat…[Read more]

Giambattista Vico’s answer to the constraints of extreme enlightened rationalism lies in the epistemological method of “explication,” or “spiegazione,” as he calls it in the New Science. Explication connects “inventively” the different logoi of human eras enabling us to understand the past comprehensively, but it also extends a bridge between t…[Read more]

In this essay, I read Pietro Verri’s “Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore” (1781) in the context of eighteenth-century theories of the mind and by placing it in dialogue with Verri’s accounts of his experiences in his autobiographical writings and letters. I aim to demonstrate how Verri, working within Enlightenment epistemological categ…[Read more]