Acta Philosophica

Experience and Metaphysics. In Dialogue with Enrico Berti

Fulvio Longato — 2025-11-14

Fulvio Longato, Gennaro Luise, Matteo Negro, Introduction

Elvio Ancona, Incontrovertibility and Historicity of Metaphysical Discourse

Stephen L. Brock, Aristotle’s Act and Potency as Relative Concepts, Neoplatonism, and Aquinas’s Pure Act

Federico Casa, Enrico Berti, the Principle of Causality and Dialogue with Legal Philosophy in Padua

Gabriele De Anna, The Common Good at the End of Modernity. Enrico Berti and the New Political Society

Silvia Gullino, Metaphor in Aristotle and Its Emotional Potential

Gennaro Luise, The Transcendence of the Principle? An Alternative to the Analytics or a Refutation of Transcendental Dialectics?

Paolo Moro, Problematical Nature of Experience and Processuality of Law. Interpretation and Outcomes of the Aristotelian Conception of Becoming

Linda M. Napolitano, The Integral Problematic Nature of Internal Experience: Self-Awareness from Socrates to Artificial Intelligence?

Matteo Negro, The Negative Way: Historicity, Dialectics and Metaphysics

Valentino Pellegrino, The Priority of the Act: A Practical Assessment

Giovanni Turco, Radical Problematicity and Philosophical Propaedeutics. Theoretical Perspectives in the Light of Enrico Berti’s Reflections

Shaban Zanelli, The Problematic Nature of Truth between Limit and Opportunity. Following the Itinerary of the Introduction to Metaphysics by Enrico Berti

Incontrovertibility and Historicity of Metaphysical Discourse in the thought of Enrico Berti

Elvio Ancona — 2025-11-14

This essay intends to reconsider some characteristic themes of the metaphysical conception developed by Enrico Berti starting from Aristotelian teaching. In particular, examining the problematic and dialectical nature of metaphysical discourse, we will focus on Berti’s thesis of the inconclusiveness of the demonstration of the Principle.

Aristotle’s Act and Potency as Relative Concepts, Neoplatonism, and Aquinas’s Pure Act

Stephen L. Brock — 2025-11-14

In an important article, Enrico Berti, reports recent studies of the manuscript tradition of Metaphysics Lambda (XII) which indicate that Aristotle never characterized the Unmoved Mover simply as “act”, but only as “in act.” According to Berti, the conception of Aristotle’s God as ʻpure actʼ results from a Neoplatonic interpretation that is closer to Plotinus than to Aristotle. Berti insists that, for Aristotle, an act without a subject is impossible, and that Aristotle’s notion of act is not absolute but relative to potency, expressing an analogy that applies to subjects of very different kinds. The present article argues that Thomas Aquinas’s way of conceiving the highest principle as pure act differs sharply from the Neoplatonic way, and that Thomas’s way is not prey to Berti’s objections. Thomas’s God is not an act without a subject, and to call Him act is indeed to relate Him to being in potency.

Enrico Berti, the Principle of Causality and Dialogue with Legal Philosophy in Padua

Federico Casa — 2025-11-14

This essay is devoted to the second edition (June 2017) of Enrico Berti’s Introduction to Metaphysics and in particular to the themes of the third chapter (The Problem, the Principle, the Path). In addition, the main objective is to emphasize how the understanding of the Paduan School of Legal Philosophy, at least from the 1980s onward, cannot today disregard the teaching of the Paduan School of Metaphysics, held first by Marino Gentile and then by His students Giovanni Romano Bacchin, Franco Chiereghin and, above all, by Enrico Berti. The Paduan legal philosophers
have often confronted and discussed His teaching and remained influenced by it, especially with reference to the metaphysical inclination to the study of legal experience, conceived in the dual meaning of “pure problematicity” and the necessity of its “transcendence”.

The Common Good at the End of Modernity

Gabriele De Anna — 2025-11-14

In a 1997 article, Enrico Berti proposed a new conception of political society that would emerge because of the crisis of national states. According to Berti, the new political society should reach supranational dimensions and should be a federation governed by the principle of subsidiarity.
This essay analyses Berti’s predictive and normative theses, suggesting – for some problems of his proposal – solutions inspired by Aristotle’s concept of of politeia, which Berti analysed in other works. The argument contends that a political society flourishes to the extent that it is representative and it aims at the common good, i.e., the fulfilment of all and each ; in order to achieve that, a political society must be articulated down to its foundations, individuals united in natural social relationships.

Metaphor in Aristotle and Its Emotional Potential

Silvia Gullino — 2025-11-14

The aim of this study is to contribute to the existing interpretations of the Aristotelian metaphor by offering an alternative perspective. The traditional interpretations defend the notion that the metaphor possesses cognitive and ornamental value. In contrast, this study proposes an ʻemotivistʼ interpretation, asserting that the transferred meaning, utilized in the domain of poetry, is capable of eliciting emotional pleasure. Specifically, the metaphor contributes to obtaining the διὰ μιμήσεως …ἡδονήν, described in chapter 14 of Aristotle’s Poetics, which constitutes the goal of every successful tragedy (καλλίστη τραγῳδία). In order to accomplish this objective, the focus will be directed towards ascertaining the essence of the cognitive and emotional process that, according to the Stagirite, emanates from the utilization of μεταφορά. This inquiry will commence with the most encompassing acknowledgment of all instances of the term that are extant within the Corpus Aristotelicum and subsequently proceed with a thorough examination of the exposition that Aristotle proffers concerning it, particularly in the context of his discourse on the poetic λέξις and its analogical, mimetic, and symbolic values.

The Transcendence of the Principle

Gennaro Luise — 2025-11-14

In this study, we present some reflections based on the reading of Kant and Criticism that emerges from some pages of Enrico Berti’s Introduction to Metaphysics, with the aim of relating them to what Berti has stated elsewhere in his vast production — often in connection with Kant. After setting forth our general interpretation of the value of progress toward a more rigorous formulation of classical metaphysics, which Berti attributes to the confrontation between this perspective and Kantian Criticism, our investigation will have two fundamental axes. First, we will address the First Analogy of Experience with thematic reference to Berti’s reading of the notion of substance, as outlined in the pages devoted to it in the Introduction to Metaphysics. Second, we will examine the natural theology in nuce elaborated by Berti, again in his Introduction, in the section simply entitled Characters of the Principle, which contains observations of no small metaphysical significance. This path may be useful in responding to the question stated in the subtitle of this essay concerning the value of Berti’s demonstration of the transcendence of the Principle, either as a genuinely positive alternative to the Transcendental Analytic or as a dialectically positive refutation of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic.

Problematical Nature of Experience and Processuality of Law

Paolo Moro — 2025-11-14

The essay explores the relationship between the problematic nature of experience and the processuality of law, analyzing the Aristotelian conception of becoming in the light of Enrico Berti’s thought, according to which the authentic problem of philosophy is the question of the multiplicity of experience. After examining the question of being in becoming, the author highlights that for Aristotle change is an undeniable and original dimension of existence (1-3) and deepens the theme of the problematic and procedural nature of reality, in which the social practice of law assumes a primary role (4). Particular attention is paid to the link between becoming and controversy in order to demonstrate that the instability of experience generates conflicts that require the intervention of law through the trial, as an organized response to the management of change and litigation (5-6). The conclusion reflects critically on the complexity of the judicial process, highlighting the theoretical and practical challenges posed by its dialectic nature (7).

The Integral Problematicity of Internal Experience: Self-Consciousness from Socrates to Artificial Intelligence?

Linda M. Napolitano — 2025-11-14

The essay moves from Enrico Berti’s Introduzione alla metafisica (1993) and in particular problematizes internal experience and its three aspects of universality, problematicity and foundationality. It first of all takes up Plato’s reading of them and the emergence of the
notion of self-consciousness or syneidènai heautôi as Socratic knowledge of not knowing. This is then compared with what emerged from the recent debate on Artificial Intelligence : human self-conciousness does not appear to be transferable to a computer precisely because of the
characteristics it displays and which make it the basis of every possible research, conducted not only on simple data but on the meanings of what is known.

The Negative Way: Historicity, Dialectics and Metaphysics

Matteo Negro — 2025-11-14

Metaphysics is necessary to history, in that it allows us to identify the relationship between the determinate becoming of problematic historical experience, always refutable by non-contradictory principles, and the transcendent becoming, teleologically founded but ungraspable in experience. It is not sufficient that the uncaused metaphysical principle is transcendent : it is necessary that the potential caused becoming is also transcendent as a condition of uncontradictoriness both of the principle of non-contradiction and of dialectical reasoning, which uses negation to refute any discourse that absolutizes experience. In turn, the absolutization of experience denies the transcendent metaphysical principle, but also denies – inevitably – the uncontradictoriness of caused becoming, arriving at the well-known Parmenidean solution, according to which only experience (or appearance) is an uncontradictory metaphysical whole and becoming in all its forms is extraneous to this whole.

The Priority of the Act: A Practical Assessment

Valentino Pellegrino — 2025-11-14

This paper examines the theory of the priority of actuality over potentiality from a practical-anthropological perspective. It takes as its
starting point Enrico Berti’s reflections on the “problematic nature of becoming”, as set out in the third chapter of his Introduction to Metaphysics. The analysis will evaluate the strength of the Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis that actuality is the proper object of the desiderative faculty. Finally, the paper will explore the philosophical and political implications of this thesis.

Radical Problematicity and Philosophical Propaedeutics

Giovanni Turco — 2025-11-14

The text considers the notion of philosophical problematicity in Enrico Berti's thought, comparing it with similar insights from contemporary authors, and concludes with a discussion about radical problematicity as coessential to philosophical inquiry at every stage and in every field. Speculative problematization emerges as an intrinsic criterion of authenticity in philosophical thought, in all its unfolding, proving vertical and omnilateral, indispensable and unavailable, both from the propaedeutic-heuristic and epistemic-theoretical perspectives.

The Problematic Nature of Truth between Limits and Opportunities

Shaban Zanelli — 2025-11-14

The essay thematizes the problematic conception of Truth as proposed and demonstrated by Enrico Berti in the Introduction to Metaphysics in order to show the possible strengths and weaknesses of the Paduan philosopher’s arguments. Specifically, without discussing the theoretical validity of Berti’s demonstration, the question is asked about the possibility of continuing to propose metaphysical research as a human task with meaning once the problematic nature of truth and experience has been accepted. Even taking into consideration different ways of interpreting the characteristics of experience and nature considered by the Paduan philosopher, the article asks whether the problematic nature, with the manifest intention of defending the necessity of metaphysics, does not end up granting too much in terms of truth to those who oppose the traditional research of first philosophy.

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Francesco Paolo Gallotta — 2025-11-14

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Francesco Maria Civili — 2025-11-14

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Lorenzo Miozzo — 2025-11-14

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Miriam Savarese — 2025-11-14

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Francesco Luigi Gallo — 2025-11-14

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Gianluca De Candia — 2025-11-14

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Valeria Ascheri — 2025-11-14