Invitation to two lectures by Alfredo Ferrarin from Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

The Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and the research group The Common Between Substance and Subject kindly  invites you to two lectures by Alfredo Ferrarin (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)

Alfredo Ferrarin is full professor of history of philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His main field of interest lies in the history of philosophy, particularly Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Hobbes, Husserl, and the philosophy of imagination. He is the author of nine monographs, several of which have appeared in translation, for a total of twelve book publications. These include Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Thinking and the I: Hegel and the Critique of Kant (Northwestern University Press, 2019); and A World Not of This World: The Reality of Images and Imagination (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025). He has also edited or co-edited eleven volumes, including La Psicologia di Hegel. Un commentario (A. di Riccio, A. Ferrarin, G. Frilli, D. Manca, eds., Hegeliana, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici Press, Naples, 2023) and Massimo Barale, Kant e la filosofia trascendentale (A. Ferrarin, C. La Rocca, and D. Manca, eds., Pisa, 2025). He has published approximately 100 articles.

From fall 2000 to June 2004, he held a dual appointment as part-time Assistant Professor at Boston University and Assistant Professor (Ricercatore) at the University of Pisa. He has taught moral philosophy, theoretical philosophy, history of philosophy, and, most recently, the philosophy of imagination in relation to epistemology and politics at Boston University, the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, where he currently teaches. He has also held several visiting appointments, including visiting professor at the University of Turin in 1999, at Boston University in 2013–2014, and at the University of Basel in 2018. 

Wednesday, 15 April 2026, 6 pm., Faculty of Arts, Room 15
Spontaneity and Receptivity in Kant

Thursday, 16 April 2026, 7 pm., Faculty of Arts, Room 325
Philosophy and history of philosophy in Hegel:
The paper is on the relation between philosophy and history of philosophy. After some introductory remarks on Kant, the main focus turns to Hegel. To determine what is still valuable in the Hegelian idea of philosophy, an examination of the Introduction to the Berlin Encyclopaedia is offered as a preparation for an analysis of the leading metaphors regarding the history of philosophy employed by Hegel in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and the relation between time and truth. After clarifying some problems that threaten to make Hegel's thesis inconsistent, I defend some aspects of his idea of philosophy in relation to history: our relation to our past, the study of tradition as a living exchange, the dialectic of continuity and break in his notion of development, the link between truth and time.