Quotes from ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

Every event has a cause--that is ... for every event e1 there exists an event e2 (or a class of events e2, e3 ...) which precedes e1 and of which e1 is a necessary consequence.... If we assent to this statement then your "choice" to do A rather than B, whatever may have been at the time your sensation of freedom from any constraint, was entirely necessitated. You could not have done otherwise and hence, according to this conception of freedom, were not free.

The meaning of a work of art is what the artist wants to communicate to his public through the work, by using a specific language. Since every language has its limitations and its problems of expression, there will be obstacles to communicating certain contents: a work's value is to be found in the ingenuity, the originality, and perhaps the economy of the solutions the artist finds to overcome these obstacles.

More tough love is needed, of the sort that makes one throw a child in the pool, hoping that she will swim; the sort that makes one get her a car, later in life, after enough practice at the simulator, and cross one's fingers as she attempts to transfer her skills from the lab to the battlefield.

Death is the end of time, of individual time at least, and the switching to an eternal instant where differences no longer hold, choices no longer need to be made, and before and after are no longer relevant.

Any position that presents itself as specifying what knowledge is has to face the issue of self-referentiality.

The essence of beauty is in variety and surprise, in richness, ambiguity, and intricacy of detail.

Beauty is a symbol of goodness; the admiration we feel for it is a symbol of the reverence inspired by the moral law.

Ambiguity is telling you something important, if only you took it seriously. If you did not quickly dispatch it as a pathology.

Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.

There are no forks in the road of history.

Philosophy is unruliness, it is exploring both sides of the issue, it is defending a position and then destroying it, it is looking for hidden contradictions, it is wondering what you will, how you will, or that you will.

What we see of madness is mostly a set of defense mechanisms against it, against the void and the anxiety that are madness. We see the obsessive ceremonies, the phobias, the hysterical symptoms, but all that is already part of a solution of the problem, unsatisfactory as it may be.

A thin present issues from a thin, sketchy, rudimentary relation with the future--one that has not much structure to it.

Fear is, as Freud would say, nothing but a signal--the more effective the more acute and unpleasant it is.

The essence of morality must be found in a careful attention to, and an attentive care for, others.

Death is the end of the struggle to make things work, to keep them together, to show a consistency of plan and action, a directionality of will.

Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.