Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell'Educazione

The goal of this seminar is to explicate Luigi Pareyson's reflections on "improvisation" in his 1954 work Estetica --in light of his broader aesthetic theory of formativity, and within the current discourse regarding the aesthetic status of improvisation.  For Pareyson, it would be safe to say that the act of improvisation-conceived within the process of artistic formation-is always also an act of interpretation, and thus in a general sense reflects the features central to Pareyson's hermeneutic theory.  Moreover, it can be argued that improvisation highlights particular aspects of interpretation that arise when the artist is faced with physical material in the process of the work's formation-aspects that are unique to the purity of the artistic process and that might not be present when humans interact with physical material in general, or when humans engage in the interpretation of knowledge or cultural forms.  Improvisation has, as its central feature, an engagement with physical material that gives rise to the impetus and ultimate fruition of the work of art.  Unlike theories of interpretation that question the artistic relevance of an act of improvisation when compared to traditional works of art, Pareyson places us on the verge of the work's emergence from physical matter, and in so doing, uncovers the limits of new realist ontologies.

Robert T. Valgenti is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. He has studied at the College of the Holy Cross, Oxford University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and DePaul University; he was also a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Turin. His research includes contemporary Italian philosophy, hermeneutics, biopolitics and the philosophy of food, with recent publications on the work of Roberto Esposito, Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche, and the philosophy of humor. He is the translator of several essays and books by Italian philosophers, most notably Luigi Pareyson's Truth and Interpretation (2013), Gianni Vattimo's Of Reality (2016), and Gaetano Chiurazzi's The Experience of Truth (2017). He is the director and founder of E.A.T. (engage, analyze, transform), an undergraduate food studies research group.  He currently serves on the leadership committee of The Menus of Change University Research Collaborative.