The theater of Pippo Delbono, whose expressiveness of the body becomes a driving force for reflections on the topic, offers Umberto Galimberti the opportunity to speak in Rovereto about "The body in the West", during a meeting with the public which will be hosted by Leonetta Bentivoglio. An illustrious philosopher and psychologist, Galimberti will address the theme of the body from the perspective of the plurality of meanings it has assumed in the West, where the body is an organism to be healed for medicine, it is a workforce to be used for the economy, it is flesh to be redeemed for religion, it is the unconscious to be liberated for psychoanalysis, it is a mannequin for fashion.
This specification will take place starting from a journey to the Greek world where, with Plato, the dualism of soul and body was inaugurated. Then we will continue with the Judeo-Christian tradition which did not have any concept of soul, and we will arrive at Descartes who reduces the body to an organism, offering science the basis for its skills. Phenomenology saves us from the "seduction of the Cartesian error", which distinguishes the organism from our living body in its relationship with the world of life. This "living body", claims Galimberti, does not need a soul to account for the human condition.
Umberto Galimberti is full professor of philosophy of history and general psychology and dynamic psychology at the University of Venice, as well as ordinary member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology. He collaborated with Il Sole 24 Ore from 1986 to 1995, and from 1995 to today he has collaborated with La Repubblica. Among his most significant publications, all published by Feltrinelli, we remember: Il tramonto dell’Occidente nella lettura di Heidegger e Jaspers (1975-1984), Psichiatria e fenomenologia (1979), Il corpo (1983), Gli equivoci dell’anima (1987), Psiche e techne. L’uomo nell’età della tecnica (1999), Orme del sacro (2000), I vizi capitali e i nuovi vizi (2003), Le cose dell’amore (2004), La casa di psiche. Dalla psicoanalisi alla pratica filosofica (2005), L’ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani (2007), I miti del nostro tempo (2009), Il segreto della domanda. Intorno alle cose umane e divine (2011). He is also the sole author of the Dictionary of psychology (Utet, 1992), and in an expanded and updated form (Garzanti, 1999). His entire work is being republished in the Universale Economica Feltrinelli, some volumes of which are translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Greek and Japanese.