Seminars WiSe 25/26 – History of Philosophy
Seminars
Lecturer: Fabian Marx, M.A.
Times: Mon, 13.10.2025 – 02.02.2026, 4–6 p.m., c.t.
Location: AR-M 0216
Description: For our seminar, the expression "middle age" will actually be useless. In any case, we would be mistaken if we think that with it we can describe something like an epoch of the history of philosophy. The merely "middle age" between antiquity and modern times that he brings to mind - a seemingly dark, decadent transitional period - is a fiction. "Dark" is this time (What time do you mean exactly?) Only for those who know little about them. We want to try to do it better. At the center of the seminar is metaphysics. With its founder Aristotle, with which our seminar will start, it is better to call it "First Philosophy". Because it is supposed to be the basic philosophical discipline that asks about the basic principles and concepts of any further philosophical-scientific investigation. We will first roughly reconstruct this intellectual project that Aristotle has left to posterity. Our goal is then to achieve his destiny by the 15th century. Century to follow. Of course, this can only be done by simplification. We will make out different traditional lines and then see where they diverge and where they cross. The goal of the seminar is achieved when it becomes clear that such simplification must necessarily fail because of the abundance of thought and subtlety of the texts we read. Text excerpts by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus and Wilhelm von Ockham are to be studied in particular in detail.
Lecturer: Dr. Francesco Molinarolo
Times: Fri, 17.10.2025 – 06.02.2026, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., c.t.
Location: AR-HB 022, AR-K 117 und AR-A 1011
Description: When we make use of the notion of “utopia” (coined in 1516 by the philosopher Thomas More), we usually mean something that is not realized and, above all, that cannot be realized. “Utopia” refers mainly to an imagined world, characterized by a set of moral, social and political structures that represent a significant improvement over the present condition. The concept of “utopia” itself, however, presents a series of problems. Why think of utopia, if it is not realizable? What is the relationship between theoretical elaboration and practical activity? Does imagining a non-existent world mean giving up on acting to change the existing world? What philosophical value was given, in the past, to utopian thought? In the course of this seminar, we will try to advance a problematizing reading of these issues, examining some famous cases of “utopias” from the early modern age. Following a historical-philosophical method, we will consider “Utopia” by Thomas More, “The City of the Sun” by Tommaso Campanella and “The New Atlantis” by Francis Bacon, to analyze their contents, their proposals and the meaning attributed to utopian thought by their authors. From this critical analysis, utopian thought will result not as a sterile exercise of the mind, but as an indispensable element to imagine and put into practice in a programmatic way the improvement of the contemporary social, cultural, philosophical environment.
Lecturer: Dr. Francesco Molinarolo
Times: Tue, 14.10.2025 – 03.02.2026, 2–4 p.m., c.t.
Location AR-HB 0117
Description: When doing philosophy, the search for the meaning of what exists, and why and how it exists, is a fundamental and constitutive element. Among the branches of philosophy that have had the greatest impact from the early-modern to the contemporary age is the philosophy of history. The founding questions of this theoretical discipline can be summarized as follows: why do events occur in a certain way? Is there an immanent or transcendent order that explains the succession of events, eras, peoples and nations? And, moreover, what is the role of the human individual, if a rational order of history indeed exists? Philosophers have tried to answer these questions in many ways, proposing idealistic, materialistic, immanent or transcendental theories. A turning point of this kind of philosophical investigation is found in the most famous work of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), "The New Science". In this deeply influential work, Vico laid the foundations for what is, in fact, a new discipline, based on the systematization of various humanistic theoretical branches and which proposed a philosophical reading of historical development. Vico’s fundamental maxim is “verum ipsum factum” (“what is true is the same as what is done”). Through this aphorism, Vico expresses the idea underlying his new historical discipline: the fact that human beings are the creators of the world in which they live, which is nonetheless governed by precise laws, that can be discovered through a philosophical and philological method. Several themes converge in the work: the relationship between the human individual and the social group; the cultural and moral function of mythology in shaping the minds of the people; the function of poetry and literature. In this seminar, we will examine in detail the focal points of Vico's work, highlighting his relationship with other important philosophers of the early modern age (especially Descartes and Spinoza). More crucially, by means of a critical understanding of Vico's thought and influence in the historical context of modern philosophy, we will problematize a long-debated issue: whether the recognition of a rationale in historical development can coexist with the autonomy of the human being in it.