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On circles and spirals. From Self-Reference to Self-Transcendence

Area 11 – Scienze storiche, filosofiche, pedagogiche e psicologiche

Whereas self–reference is primarily studied in the context of philosophy of language, this volume attempts to show how it encompasses very traditional questionings in the history of continental philosophy from its beginning and all along its most crucial turning points. Every time philosophy has looked for causes, both on an ontological and an epistemological plane, it has ultimately faced the phantom of the infinite regress, the ramification of the supposed linearity, and the loss of the origin. The circularity of self–reference is itself the expression of a fundamental indetermination and seems to sanction an impassable boundary for thought. We tried to challenge this sentence by discussing some very implications of self–reference, some of its occurrences, and, if needed, recasting its definition to the extent of shifting the connected idea of aporetic reflexivity to that of self–transcendence, where the prefix “self” stops to make allusion to the selfhood of an idem and points at the dynamic processuality of a complex system.

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