Per una filosofia terrestre

L’attuale convergenza di filosofia e geografia e e le sue radici storico-culturali nella crisi della ragione

Abstract

I start from some considerations on the current convergence of philosophical research and geographical research, which configures a true "terrestrial philosophy" and which has its forerunner in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and contemporary points of reference in the work of Augustin Berque, Tim Ingold, by Dipesh Chakrabarty. I try therefore to show how the paradigm of a geographical and terrestrial history has its roots in the crisis of classical reason that affected European culture between the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. I focus therefore on the new sense of space and depth that took hold at the end of the 19th century, with the pictorial revolution that culminated in the work of Paul Cézanne and, in particular, on some aspects of the work of Aloïs Riegl. Subsequently, I investigate how a new sense of history and the terrestrial develops with research on realism, on everyday life, on the epistemology of the fragment, on the "intermediate space" ("the Anteroom") of Eric Auerbach and Sigfried Kracauer. Then I return to some aspects of the theory of history and the institution that Merleau-Ponty outlines in the course at the Collège de France Institution and passivity of 1954-1955 (Italian translation Mimesis, Milan, 2023). In drawing conclusions, obviously provisional, I try to outline the prospects of research on the topic of geographical history or historical geography that derive from the models I focused on previously.