cosimo franco Manni

Reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings, I feel immersed in a world which differs from that of my normal daily experience. This would in some measure be true, of course, for any interesting novel: the events are experienced by other people (the characters) and theirs are the decisions, the joys and the perils. Furthermore, in The Lord of the Rings I feel immersed in the Middle Ages. When I read books about medieval history, though, my mind resists this sensation; if I were to be transported in my imagination to any century of the Middle Ages, it would never be the same as the world of LotR, which is much wider than the medieval period, more complex, more idealized and closer to me and my experience (although not, of course, the greater part of it).

To provide a new1 rational proof of the existence of God is an intellectual challenge which has been undertaken for millennia and still is in recent times: from the 20th century we can find those ones provided by Kurt Goedel (403-404), Jacques Maritain (, Clive S. Lewis; from the 21st century that one by Harvey Friedman2. This challenge is not peculiarly medieval, even though, as Denys Turner observes, it seems paradoxical that in the Middle Ages, when everybody claimed to believe in God, the theologians always used to provide a proof , whereas throughout the last century, when explicit atheism has become more widespread, they have been more reluctant at doing that, because they were and are more interested in Christ than in the generic God of philosophical theology3. In fact, the scholars mentioned above are two logicians, one philosopher and one professor of literature. Moreover, even amongst the philosophers this topic is not popular because, perhaps, most contemporary philosophers lean toward atheism4

As happened in the conflict between von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Nietzsche, even today there are philologists who do not believe that philosophy is a respectable science. One of them is Tom Shippey, a scholar of English and Germanic philology. In this paper I want to argue two things: 1) that in the golden age of philology, the major philologists were directly influenced by the philosophers; 2) that in a reform of the faculty of Arts and Humanities it would be possible to improve the syllabus of Philology linking it to philosophical texts, and to improve the syllabus of Philosophy by immersing it in the history of philosophy and its texts.

Still today the main purpose of proving the existence of God is to show how it is possible for all people to know that God exists without relying on a personal religious faith. Here I focus on a proof that garnered attention because Leibniz, Bergson and Heidegger supported it, but later on it was revived by the English philosopher Herbert McCabe. This proof consists of a question: “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?”. Even though it seems to have Existentialist leanings (it is somehow twisted to reverse the atheistic assumption present in Sartre’s L’AStre et le NA©ant), McCabe develops this proof within a broad “scientific” context – as, for instance, when he rebukes Bertrand Russell for his answer – that is he starts from the existence of the universe and not from the existence of the individual human ego, whereas the latter was indeed the starting point of the Existentialists. As opposed to all the other versions, McCabe’s proof is stron...

The English Dominican Herbert McCabe highlighted some ideas of Thomas Aquinas on the knowability of God and on creation, which can usefully challenge some widespread commonplaces. The purposes of this article are two: to present McCabe’s sophisticated doctrine on the knowability of God and on creation in a systematic way, and to put this doctrine into its historical context. In the scattered and meagre scholarship on McCabe, both points are missing. In fact, despite being highly praised by leading intellectuals such as Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair McIntyre, Terry Eagleton, David Burrell, Rowan Williams, Denys Turner, and Eamon Duffy, McCabe has remained widely unknown. According to McCabe, both the American creationists and some atheist scientists believe that God—given that he exists—is a powerful entity within the universe, and thus both the atheist and the creationist expect exactly the same elements in the universe. However, according to McCabe, God does not act like natural cause...

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are ‘linguistic animals’ because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. ...

The paper presents the story of a contemporary Thomistic debate that deals with a crucial theological question, i.e. whether or not our knowledge of God is related to his nature/essence, and its legacy to theology of our time. Throughout the last 60 years there has been an intense debate among Thomist scholars belonging to different generations: R. Garrigou Lagrange, E. Gilson, H. McCabe, F. Kerr, J. Wippel, M. Perez de Laborda, D. Turner and I. McFarland. The legacy from this debate is that both in contemporary philosophical and revealed theology a cautious distinction is needed: while it is legitimate and profitable to apply contemporary anti-essentialist criticism to natural and social sciences and, also, to cosmology and philosophical anthropology, this should not be done in regards of God. In fact, in God, because of his non-changeability and simplicity, everything is of his essence, and this essence is unknowable.

The English Dominican Herbert McCabe highlighted some ideas of Thomas Aquinas on the knowability of God and on creation, which can usefully challenge some widespread commonplaces. The purposes of this article are two: to present McCabe’s sophisticated doctrine on the knowability of God and on creation in a systematic way, and to put this doctrine into its historical context. In the scattered and meagre scholarship on McCabe, both points are missing. In fact, despite being highly praised by leading intellectuals such as Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair McIntyre, Terry Eagleton, David Burrell, Rowan Williams, Denys Turner, and Eamon Duffy, McCabe has remained widely unknown. According to McCabe, both the American creationists and some atheist scientists believe that God—given that he exists—is a powerful entity within the universe, and thus both the atheist and the creationist expect exactly the same elements in the universe. However, according to McCabe, God does not act like natural causes; he is not an element within the universe and not even the most powerful of all the elements, because he created the universe from nothing and is not part of it.

This essay  takes note of the return of the far right to government in Italy. Its central contention is that Italy has traditionally lacked a liberal culture with Fascism and Marxist communism having always been the prevailing currents of thought there. I will subsequently argue that the Italian political tradition must start anew from the minority of Italian liberal thinkers who have been fought, marginalised and eventually forgotten throughout its history, most notably, Benedetto Croce and Norberto Bobbio.

Reviewed by Franco Manni Alasdair Davidson's Antonio Gramsci was originally published in 1976 and while this new edition does not contain any updated material, it comes with a new introduction in which the author claims the book to be the latest major English-language biography of Gramsci.

I present a short summary of the traditional pagan and Christian legacy claiming that  hell is above all a place of pain and the objections that have been addressed to it. Then I proceed to my main point: tracing a philosophical thread from Plato to Aristotle and then from Augustine to Aquinas, and citing a psychological experience of everyday life, I maintain that: 1) either there is no pain in hell, or 2) hell is not the worst thing that can happen to a human being.
Then I present four possible objections to my thesis and attempt to counter them.
In the last section I point to some practical consequences on the pastoral level that could ensue from a different doctrine on the nature of hell..

As happened in the conflict between Wilamowitz and Nietzsche, even today there are philologists who do not believe that philosophy is a respectable science. One of them is Tom Shippey, a scholar of English and Germanic philology. In this paper I want to argue two things. 1) that in the golden age of philology, the major philologists were directly influenced by the philosophers. 2) that in a reform of the faculty of Arts and Humanities it would be possible to improve the syllabus of Philology linking it to philosophical texts, and to improve the syllabus of Philosophy by immersing it in the history of philosophy and its texts.

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are 'linguistic animals' because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. On the other hand, concepts do not exist on their own.

Although the topic of Tolkien and his philosophical influences has been discussed on a number of previous occasions, the completely original aim of this paper is to chart in a systematic manner his engagements with a number of different philosophers from the canon of western thought. In his works Tolkien never refers to philosophers by name, neither classical figures such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and so on, nor his contemporaries such as Freud, Bergson, Croce, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Popper or Ryle. However, this paper, for the first time, provides various degrees of evidence and show how several individual philosophers or schools of philosophy were indeed present in Tolkien's fictional works.

"Race" is synonymous with "subspecies", that is, a sub-set of whatever species of living beings.

If there is no interfertility between one species and another species, there is indeed interfertility between a race (subspecies) and another race, as we have seen for centuries in the equine, canine and even human races.

The divisions in groups of humanity are evident based on religious beliefs (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), with respect to the nationality i.e. language (Francophones, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Hispanic, etc.). And a division with respect to biological characteristics is also evident (black, Asians, mulattos, whites, etc.) These biological characteristics are precisely the several subspecies or races of our one species homo sapiens ...

But because of the tragedy of Nazism and the Holocaust, and because of racism, even later and now, there is a moral and intellectual trauma in the Western conscience and this trauma causes the political ideology to confuse racism, which is a political fact, with the existence of races, which is only a biological fact.

Racism means to believe that one race is superior to the others and also that, because of this presumed superiority, it can afford to take off others’ rights and limit or suppress them in order to dominate or persecute the allegedly ‘inferior’ races.

‘Race’ means that a group of individuals can be grouped together by somatic similarities that unite them more than with other individuals.

What features? They are not those of the internal organs such as pancreas or blood composition, etc., but the external, visible, which strike at first sight: skin colour, shape of the nose, glabrity or skinniness of the skin etc.

Those who deny the existence of races (and therefore of these different physical criteria of grouping), certainly will never be able to convince ordinary people in whose eyes these differences are evident and will never disappear. Or to convince the police or the employers!

But they commit the grave error both intellectual and moral to give this message to people: " in order to affirm that all human beings have equal dignity and therefore must have equal rights, we must affirm that they are equal in their material and de facto situations , like, for example the physical characteristics".

... but this is a serious mistake, because equal dignity must be recognized not if we are equal (all Christians, all heterosexuals, all healthy, all fascists or all communists for that matter, all of the same biological group)! NO!

Equal dignity must be recognized precisely when we see that materially, economically, linguistically by political opinion, by religious faith, by somatic characteristics, by sexual orientation WE ARE DIFFERENT. Equal moral and legal dignity, despite the material and social de facto differences!!!

Otherwise the same concept of tolerance disappears. In fact, it is absurd to say that you practice the virtue of tolerance towards those who are equal to you by religion, social class, nationality, etc.!

Tolerance is practiced precisely towards those who are different from you!

If you really do not want to hit the sick hypersensitivity of these people who deny the existence of the races, you should also use another word (biological groups, subspecies, genetic classes ... you choose!)

... but it is an intellectual and moral error to deny reality!