Giovanni Reale

Giovanni Reale

Giovanni Reale (1931-2004) was an Italian historian of philosophy.

Quotes

  • Faced with death, one cannot help but cry... Crying is suffering in the face of true evil, and what is more true than death?
    • Quoted in Corriere della Sera, 26 January 2010
  • Camus said that Christ came into this world to face two problems that philosophy will never solve. First: why do I suffer? And second: why am I born with a sign around my neck saying “condemned to death”? Jesus took them upon himself, thus making them sacred.
    • Quoted in Corriere della Sera, 26 January 2010
  • Aristotle was not only his critic, but also his most brilliant student. He rejected his doctrine of ideas, but I am not so convinced that he was horrified by his political convictions. He borrowed the ethical virtue as a happy medium between extremes from Platonic thought.
  • [On The Multiple Meanings of Being According to Aristotle] Among the various books I have read and studied on the philosophy of Aristotle, this one by Brentano certainly occupies one of the top places, if not the first.
    • From the preface to Franz Brentano, Sui molteplici significati dell'essere secondo Aristotele, Giovanni Reale (editor), Stefano Tognoli (translator), Vita e pensiero, 1995
  • The democracy to which Plato refers is not ours. For him, democracy is demagoguery, i.e. the lawfulness that leads to chaos. In his view, the flaw of demagoguery is the absolute excess of freedom that slips into licence. It is in this situation that man unleashes his worst instincts...Every government, he tells us, is exposed to deterioration. The three forms of government that Plato imagined – those “of the best”, “of the few” and “of the many” – can become corrupt. But the worst of all is the government “of the best”: the king who turns into a tyrant. Plato was never kind to tyrants.
  • While the term "henology" is widely used in foreign languages, for example in French, it is almost never used in Italian and should therefore be introduced. We have used the initial h because it conveys the harsh spirit of έν, but above all to differentiate the metaphysical term from the current one.
    • G. Reale, L'estremo messaggio spirituale del mondo antico nel pensiero metafisico e teurgico di Proclo, in Proclo, I Manuali, Milano, Rusconi, 1985, p. LXX, n. 15.
  • I leave no room for euthanasia. I don't say, “Let me die”. But, “Let me die as nature intended”. Neither you nor I. Nature. Take the case of Piergiorgio Welby, whom I followed closely. Welby did not essentially say: pull the plug. But: let nature take its course, do not make me a victim of technology that builds something artificial and substitute for nature. It is identical to what John Paul II is said to have said: let me return to my Father's house. The latter had faith, the former did not. For Welby, it was a journey into absolute darkness, for the Pope, into life. But from a human point of view, it is the same understandable request.
  • Plato can be considered the philosopher who is both the easiest and the most difficult to read.

He can be defined as the easiest philosopher to read, in that, given the richness of his content and the exquisite artistry and extraordinary mastery with which his writings are composed, they communicate messages to men of culture of all times... On the other hand, he should be considered a difficult thinker and writer to read and interpret, due to the fact that he largely departs from the patterns imposed by modern and contemporary culture.

    • Introduzione generale al pensiero di Platone, in Platone, Tutti gli scritti, Bompiani, Milano, 2000. ISBN 88-452-9003-4.
  • The prevailing idea is that knowledge derives from science and that technology solves all problems. Yet popper and the epistemologists have explained that science, by definition, cannot have universal and necessary ideas, but only ideas that are consistent with a paradigm that is dominant at that particular moment. The beauty of philosophy is that it can also contain opposing systems, because our ideas are not definitive.
  • I am shocked by the idea that there are still people who take seriously Popper's analysis of Plato – “that bitter enemy of freedom”, as Marcello Pera uncritically describes him – without questioning the texts, checking the quotations or comparing them. These are elementary operations. Today, these may be unknown to most people, but they cannot escape the attention of a scholar who aspires to this role or who remembers them.
  • [On the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools] In France and Spain, where it has been almost eliminated from secondary schools, they have regretted it. In Germany, there is no possibility of an intermediate level of knowledge. A philosopher like Gadamer is much better understood in Italy than in Germany. He once told me that when he came here he felt like he was in a sanctuary: all those young people who came to hear him had tools of understanding that no other country had.

See also

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