This paper explores the philosophies of myth of Walter Benjamin and Hans Blumenberg. It defends the thesis that both approaches to myth, despite their differences, bring the longer, more ambiguous, legacy of the history of the human species into relation with the more familiar history of logos (a history of thinking). They do this by maintaining a distinction between myth as it probably first emerged, namely as a way of controlling human anxieties and vulnerabilities that arose as a consequence of (...) the pragmatic, material conditions of the pre-historical world, and myth as the vast array of orally transmitted traditions left to history. In the case of both thinkers, this dichotomy illuminates myth, not as one category of human expression, but as a representation of the deeper vulnerabilities experienced by human beings, and the concerted, collective (largely failed) attempts to overcome them. Philosophy’s task in the face of a longer, darker history of the species, is a vigilant negotiation with the human frailties that might see its work undone. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the relationship between marriage and equality in Giambattista Vico. In his writings Vico gives the notion of marriage a unique importance, not framed on any oversized notion of nature or natural law but on the political fight for the right to marry (a quest for full citizenship status). The right to marry is linked with complex dynamics of human equality, and to a notion of human nature shaped by belief-dependent institutions.

The aim of this work is to show how Edgar Morin chose Vico and Hegel as cultural points of reference while elaborating a new method as an alternative to classical scientific knowledge. The French philosopher did this specifically when he tried to re-propose the problem s of history and the event in human sciences. The origins of sociology arose from the explicit extension of the scientific method to the socio-anthropological world; that is, with the intention of studying society as a (...) natural phenomenon to which the laws of physical and biological sciences must be applied. As a tendency against this, at the end of the 1970s Morin began a process of putting sociology into historical context, which led him to a methodological revolution of sociology itself. (shrink)