of concepts are the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles and the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, which were completed respectively eight and seven years ago, while Reinhart Koselleck’s approach to the history of political concepts, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe was achieved already in 1989. English-speaking interest in Begriffsgeschichte has provoked a conspicuous linguistic turn in current history of philosophy. While the history of “purely” philosophical concepts keeps playing a central role within the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Donald R. Kelley and Schneider have made it clear, however, that the history of philosophy and intellectual history cannot be said to be co-extensive. The “intelligible” field of study is language, or languages, and history of philosophy is not the model of but rather the province in the larger arena of interpretation of intellectual history. The role of the history of philosophy finds thus a re-positioning as a separate field within the approach of intellectual history, which is being disseminated by Howard Hotson and the current editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Warren Breckman, Martin J. Burke, Anthony Grafton, and Ann E. Moyer. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, history of philosophy must be reinvented on the basis of a development towards all diverse cultures of humankind. But not only the past should be taken into consideration, the redesign of the present is of equal importance. Intercultural history of philosophy is a means for making variety heard. Interculturality derives from the overlapping of cultures. Intercultural philosophy is by no means an exotic notion for anything non-European, it is instead an attitude that precedes philosophical thinking. Only then comparative philosophy becomes possible. Working
establishing the relation between the “history of philosophy” and the “science of philosophy” making it clear the former is the latter’s Hauptsache. In a much debased form, the impact of Hegel’s thought accounts for the unreflective use of catchwords such as “alienation,” “ideology,” “fetishism,” “contradiction,” and “superstructure,” in the current vocabulary of journalists and high-school students. How were we to understand this? That makes the starting point. 3 Intercultural history of philosophy is by its nature multilingual. Today, we can interrogate texts among different alphabets. Philosophy is particularly apt for experiments in multilingual semantic alignment, because of its essential, non-redundant lexicon, which is the result of longstanding codifications. For instance, a textual string in the Ancient Greek alphabet such as γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seautón), nosce te ispsum, “know yourself” can be transliterated today biunivocally in the Roman alphabet and, due to constant Unicode development, shall produce in the near future new reliable biunivocal transliterations. The issue is access and content dissemination of intercultural contents. The solution is the new discipline of the intercultural history of philosophy, alongside with the setting up of an open lab environment for experimentation, creative applications and services consisting of a flexible and open infrastructure for an intercultural presentation of key-concepts, such as Amor, Bios, Conscientia, Lex, Libertas, Memoria, Methodus, Nihil, Paideia, Persona, Polis, and Topos. Scholars in digital humanities agree in seeing a handful of leading models for the future of the book. There is the vertical model for setting up e-books, advocated by Robert Darnton, according to which the reader of a hypertext shall start at the top level by
The prerequisite is a nomenclature of key-concepts, which shall provide the narratives of the pyramidal hypertext to be set up, thus providing an innovative format for presenting linear texts and multimedia contents. The individual concepts are indicated with their Greek or Latin forms, which are the beginning of their history and evolution in the different languages of Europe. In fact, some of the most important facets of Greek culture remain greatly influential on the historical and cultural identity of the Roman and Byzantine ages, even though more and more interwoven with the intellectual perspectives provided by Judaism and Early Christianity. Different forms of cultural universalism were experimented in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance and in early modernity, for example the first steps toward a République des Lettres. What makes special education is not a canon of scattered texts, but familiarity with traditions and their plurality. Although English has become indispensable in its function of auxiliary international language (as Umberto Eco has put it), the lingua franca of our days, no nation state can afford to lose its linguistic variety. In the humanities, everything speaks in favour of multingualism. Besides, a substantial batch of key-concepts has already been investigated during twelve international symposia held at the ILIESI-CNR. They have been already published on paper in the “Lessico Intellettuale Europeo” (LIE) series and shall be posted open access on the ILIESI-CNR website. They are: Experientia (LIE, vol. 91), Idea (LIE, vol. 51), Machina (LIE, vol. 98), Materia (LIE, vol. 112), Natura (LIE, vol. 105), Ordo (LIE, vols. 20-21), Phantasia (LIE, vol. 46), Ratio (LIE, vol. 61), Res (LIE, vol. 26), Sensus (LIE, vol. 66), Signum (LIE, vol. 77), and Spiritus (LIE, vol. 32). There is nonetheless a strong connection among the key-concepts indicated above. The new challenge is to work on the new forms of interrogation that today’s digital