(March 20, 2017) An extraordinary opportunity - such as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Luigi Pirandello - demanded a special guest. And so it was in Sydney, where with the support of the Italian Institute of Culture one of the major Italian philosophers, Remo Bodei, held a series of fascinating lectures, all characterized by its brilliant prose, in different cultural centers of the city. The noted philosopher gave a lecture entitled "Pirandello and the dissolution of personality" at the University of Sydney. Especially the theme of split personality, treated with virtuosity by Pirandello in multiple works was tackled. The Sicilian writer has followed the positions of the French "doctors-philosophers" Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet and Paul Binet, which the late nineteenth century had destroyed the image of a monolithic me and immortal soul. As in the human organism multicellular system, so the individual has more personality, a "parliament of I", coordinated by an hegemon I, "Moi Le Soleil". When hegemon I finds himself in front of an insuperable difficulty, it is forced to abdicate and the others I come into conflict: there is no longer an I who co-ordinates and you are a lot of personality. "The Late Mattia Pascal", "One, No one and One Hundred Thousand", "La Carriola", "Il Chiodo", are some of the works cited by the philosopher in his lecture. At the Department of Philosophy at the University of NSW Professor Bodei instead held a conference on the figure of the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel entitled "Hegel on the origin of the social hierarchy. Fro the Phenomenology of the Mind to the Philosophy of Law". In his Berlin period Hegel believed that the Western world and the entire philosophical thought were destined to enter a phase of decline. Some irreconcilable contradictions governed philosophy, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at nightfall, to observe and carefully examine this difficult age and to push the "mole" of history to dig underground. The owl sees but does not act; the mole acts but does not see. While, therefore, Hegel Berlin felt himself placed in a period in which the future prospects were dark, in previous years, on the contrary, for reasons both political and philosophical, he felt he was going to make his way a new world, as he had shown in the Phenomenology of spirit, written between 1805 and October 1806. The third conference presented by the Italian Institute of Culture in association with the Western Sydney University was held at the State Library of NSW. Professor Bodei analyzed the problems related to memory and oblivion with particular regard to the grounds on which individuals and communities to give up the past, or forget it. This was followed by a speech by Professor Douglas Moggach, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. The title of the conference "Between memory and oblivion: a conflictual complicity" alludes to a kind of chess game, ideal and metaphorical, in which memory and oblivion are competing for individual and collective identity transformations as a result of trauma politician (a revolution or violent fall of seemingly established regimes or natural disasters) or sudden disappearance of traditional ways of life. (Red)

ABOUT / REMO BODEI

Remo Bodei was born in Cagliari in 1938. After his graduation at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, he furthered his historical-philosophical studies in Tübingen, Freiburg in Breisgau, Heidelberg, Bochum and Berlin. A great figure of contemporary philosopy, he is currently professor emeritus at the University of Pisa, where he held the chair of history and philosopy until 2005. He is also visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was full professor between 2005 and 2011. He has been visiting professor in various European and American universities (Ottawa University, Toronto University, NYU, Université Libre de Bruxelles, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, Universitat de Girona, Universidad Autónoma de México).