{"id":15,"date":"2010-02-22T23:57:48","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T23:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=15"},"modified":"2016-03-30T10:58:20","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T10:58:20","slug":"baroncelli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/05-1\/reviews51\/baroncelli\/","title":{"rendered":"Flavio Baroncelli, Mi manda Platone, edited by Annalisa Siri and Emilio Mazza (Genoa: il melangolo, 2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
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Flavio Baroncelli\u2019s posthumous collection of short pieces by il melangolo is a splendid exception to standard philosophical literature. It is a slender book (157 pp.) that can be read purely and simply. Indeed, to the extent available to hopeless academically minded professional philosophers like myself, it can be enjoyed as a string of exquisite literary-philosophical vignettes. These short pieces, originally published in various Italian periodicals and newspapers, range from scholarly debates on Plato\u2019s role in Western culture to the pride of showing scars and tattoos on one\u2019s own body. They are divided in two parts, the former dealing with philosophical themes (15-83) and the latter dealing with ordinary life and socio-political affairs (87-149). Witty and concise, they retain the inventiveness and the curiosity that characterised Baroncelli\u2019s life, of which Armando Massarenti, Emilio Mazza, Annalisa Siri and G\u00fcrol Sagiroglu Baroncelli provide a useful account via the preface (5-8), a short biography (151-3) and an editorial note (155-7).<\/div>\n
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Some professional philosophers, like the undersigned, may attempt to make some use of Baroncelli\u2019s book, e.g. by writing a review of it. However, the review is bound to be fairly unorthodox. What can one say of a book that reads: refreshingly colloquial yet deep; humbly self-depreciating but highly learned; ironically sceptical though warmly humane; both open to the general public and pregnant nonetheless with precious insights for actual academics? Baroncelli\u2019s prose, full of abstraction-averse, real-life examples and academic-pomposity-shattering vernacular gems, flows like the prose of his eighteenth-century role-models. Most of all, it recalls Voltaire\u2019s prose, whose humour and compassion it evokes when dealing with topics such as tolerance, liberty, dignity, multiculturalism, religion and scientific realism.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps, the author of this slender book would have preferred to be compared to David Hume, whom Baroncelli admired and studied. Or even to Hume\u2019s and the French philosophes<\/em>\u2019 much older mentor, i.e. Michel de Montaigne, to whom Baroncelli devotes a delightful sketch (23-6). Still, it is Voltaire the name that springs to mind when Baroncelli combines together, with a few touches of his pen, experience, irony, linguistic analysis, moral wisdom and intellectual acumen.<\/p>\n

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Professional philosophers may fear such a facility of expression. Clear and pleasant language is often seen as a threat to an argument\u2019s poignancy and visibility. Long, tedious, difficult passages abound in philosophical literature. This happens not solely because philosophers are not poets or novelists, though they may be failed ones, but also because philosophers want the full load of reasoning poured into their works to be felt and borne by the reader. Whenever reasoning seems too unhindered and beautifully rendered, professional philosophers are likely to accuse it of being either \u201cshallow\u201d or \u201crhetorical\u201d, if not even both. Nonetheless Baroncelli was a professional philosopher, and a good one. His arguments are sound, they stand on solid ground, and they are written so well and humorously \u2013 there is enough to become bitterly envious.<\/p>\n

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Certainly, the same philosophers that treat as \u201cshallow\u201d and \u201crhetorical\u201d their literarily gifted colleagues are likely to accuse me of being partial. After all, I knew personally Flavio Baroncelli as a teacher, mentor, and friend. That is why I shall invite them to attempt to read simply his latest and, probably, last book. They should follow the advice that he himself gave with regard to Plato, whom one should read \u201cbecause he is useless\u201d (66). Hopefully, they will appreciate Baroncelli\u2019s gentle and humorous way of being a genuine, unpretentious source of enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Typically, professional philosophers no longer read philosophy books written by their colleagues; they use them. They review them. They select passages. They extract arguments. They build theories or new books upon them. They build theories or new books against them. Very rarely, and quite unexpectedly, they read them, purely and simply. As a matter of academic life, these books are not even written to be read purely and simply. On the contrary, they are written precisely for the various uses that can be expected of them within academia. Very rarely, after all, are such books not rhetorically challenged, lengthy, full of jargon, taxing, pretentious, of limited enjoyment and, at least to non-professionals, plainly boring.<\/p>\n

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