Book Reviews by Marco Crosa
Edgar Morin, a quest after The Method, 2023
Edgar Morin is the promoter and greatest continental representative of complex thinking and trans... more Edgar Morin is the promoter and greatest continental representative of complex thinking and transdisciplinarity. Direct witness of the Age of Extremes, both with personal and philosophical involvement, he distanced himself from any adherence to a specific school of thought in order to pursue a personal program. Today, although turned one hundred in 2021 and with a huge production on his shoulders, most of his work remain not known in the English language. Morin developed his complex method in a six volume work without mentioning previous and following publications which can be included on the same pathway. Of those six volumes only the first can be found in an English library. Most of his later production is devoted to a reform of thinking as the seminal Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future shows. The essay serves as a detour of the entire Method through the main concepts he developed while routing complex and trans-disciplinaries studies. Further references and examples are added for major clarifications.
Review of Pisano R, Agassi J, Drozdova D - Homage to Alexandre Koyré
Sofia Philosophical Review, Dec 30, 2022
The work is a collection of 21 papers with at the center the figure of Alexander Koyré. From the ... more The work is a collection of 21 papers with at the center the figure of Alexander Koyré. From the reading several understanding keys emerge each interconnecting and overlapping with the others. Far from considering my analysys the ultimate I believe it will help the readers on accessing the entire collection that might shows itself quite complex for the variety of the topics which are addressed.
Frankenstein Incompreso, una recensione del libro di Mary Shelley.
Filosofi Precari, 2012
The publication is in Italian, here an English abstract of the content.
Frankenstein is one o... more The publication is in Italian, here an English abstract of the content.
Frankenstein is one of those stories that anyone has heard about but that only a few have actually read. The imaginary of the book has become so much powerful to influence the later literary tradition. It is also one of the main fictional reference on Philosophy of Science and Bioethics debates and it concurs to shape the popular perception of technological progress. However its original meaning has been distorted by following theatre and film adaptations. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is a strong humanistic science fiction novel and it is not at all a lesson about the dangers of science.
No moral warning on the role of modern science emerges from the narration. The Rousseau‘s is the only significant philosophy but it is always forgotten by critics. Like Emile – the character of the pedagogical treatise of the french philosopher – the creature is born innocent, it grows up with strong and pure values but it turns evil because of the non recognition by his "creator" and by society. The real monster of the novel it seems to be Victor, the egotistical and immature father, who never faces the responsibility of its own creation and who condemns his wretched son to an eternal and anonymous solitude.
Phenomenological Reviews, 2017
Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds by Tanja Staehler is an effort of integ... more Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds by Tanja Staehler is an effort of integration between the phenomenological thinking of two of the most influential philosophers in the contemporary tradition: G.W.F. Hegel and Edmund Husserl.
The author’s intention is to re-frame a #phenomenology of historical and cultural worlds by offering a mutual interpenetration of the two German philosophers.
The main thesis shows how Husserl’s phenomenology radicalises Hegel’s by adding the character of infinite openness to the teleological development of historical Spirit which afterwards will manifest itself as horizonally constituted.
At the same time an Hegelian narrative applies to the entire “parabola” of Husserl’s thought, which the author describes as a progressive development from an abstract to a concrete phenomenology.
Staehler takes the side of #Derrida and #Steinbock by defending the presence of a third phase in Husserl’s #philosophy, alongside the static and the genetic, which she names historical. The three stages also serve as the methodological sections of the work.
Papers by Marco Crosa
On Gods, Heroes and Men. A Comparison of Tolstoy and Vico's Philosophies of History
Philosophical Alternatives, 2024
While proceeding toward the end of War and Peace a reader can find itself startling and strugglin... more While proceeding toward the end of War and Peace a reader can find itself startling and struggling to understand what kind of work is actually dealing with. The fictional narration is not yet concluded when L. Tolstoy (1828–1910) starts to lose himself in philosophical discussions regarding the nature of history as a science. Suddenly words such as god, heroes and men start to fill the pages recalling in the mind the language of a philosopher with at his back a history of long oblivion, the Italian G. Vico (1668–1744). The common terminology is only the triggering point for approaching a possible comparison between two authors that are so distant for time, context, interests, life and styles. A deep reading of their works however reveals some points of contact especially in a critique of their contemporary historicism, in their common interests on history as an objective science, on the analyses of events recollection and invention of tradition, in their overlapping instances of heterogeneity of ends and their reference to divine providence. A specific and different investigation might be necessary in order to understand whether those concepts somehow traveled along about one century and half from one to the other or whether they are just floating ideas of historical discourse. Nevertheless, starting from their commonalities the paper offers a clue on their inevitable divergences and a possible development of some of their central concepts. Being Tolstoy a writer of the ungraspable and indeterminate, concepts related to complex thinking will emerge during the reading.
Sofia Philosophical Review, 2023
After two centuries, the Diltheyan idea of the incommensurability of the natural and social scien... more After two centuries, the Diltheyan idea of the incommensurability of the natural and social sciences remains hegemonic. Alternative visions have since been overlooked; in this regard, the Baden neo-Kantian school showed that any divergence concerns implied method and not the phenomenal object of studies. Windelband coined the terms "nomological" and "idiographic" to underline how each discipline can be explained as a science of both law and events. To begin, I will show how complex thinking can expand and institute a general integrative frame that overcomes the assumed incommensurability. By "complex," I mean an anti-reductionist approach to understanding and a consequent ability to reveal the phenomenal world in terms of nesting self-organized systems. Social and natural systems are persistent coalescences of individual entities showing series of inter-duality such as unicity and multiplicity, top-down conservation and bottom-up innovation, constraint of law and freedom of agencies. The two instances are maintained together by the rejection of abstracted and isolated concepts and the embrace of a general principle of indeterminacy resolving the apparent contradiction within the parallelization of the extremes as two different moments of analyses rooted in the social and natural classical methods. This paper considers both a) the Positivist attempt in the XIX century to approach the study of social phenomena in terms of law and b) the emergence of a general social science embracing the principle of acasuality, adapted from the study of the subatomic phenomenal world in quantum theory. Finally, this paper sketches how complex methodology can address historical and social studies with system theory to overcome classical dualities such as determinism vs. freedom, social vs. individual, and top down conservation vs. bottom up innovation in integrative parallelization.
Uploads
Book Reviews by Marco Crosa
Frankenstein is one of those stories that anyone has heard about but that only a few have actually read. The imaginary of the book has become so much powerful to influence the later literary tradition. It is also one of the main fictional reference on Philosophy of Science and Bioethics debates and it concurs to shape the popular perception of technological progress. However its original meaning has been distorted by following theatre and film adaptations. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, is a strong humanistic science fiction novel and it is not at all a lesson about the dangers of science.
No moral warning on the role of modern science emerges from the narration. The Rousseau‘s is the only significant philosophy but it is always forgotten by critics. Like Emile – the character of the pedagogical treatise of the french philosopher – the creature is born innocent, it grows up with strong and pure values but it turns evil because of the non recognition by his "creator" and by society. The real monster of the novel it seems to be Victor, the egotistical and immature father, who never faces the responsibility of its own creation and who condemns his wretched son to an eternal and anonymous solitude.
The author’s intention is to re-frame a #phenomenology of historical and cultural worlds by offering a mutual interpenetration of the two German philosophers.
The main thesis shows how Husserl’s phenomenology radicalises Hegel’s by adding the character of infinite openness to the teleological development of historical Spirit which afterwards will manifest itself as horizonally constituted.
At the same time an Hegelian narrative applies to the entire “parabola” of Husserl’s thought, which the author describes as a progressive development from an abstract to a concrete phenomenology.
Staehler takes the side of #Derrida and #Steinbock by defending the presence of a third phase in Husserl’s #philosophy, alongside the static and the genetic, which she names historical. The three stages also serve as the methodological sections of the work.
Papers by Marco Crosa