The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "Thinking Art" (Pensare l'Arte) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics for its tenth anniversary (Palermo, December 14-15, 1990).

EmiIio Garroni, Aesthetics and Critical Philosophy
Thinking about art amounts to thinking about aesthetics. But aesthetics, first of all the initial aesthetics of the 18th century, must not be interpreted - both from a theoretical viewpoint, and from a historiographic viewpoint, i.e. in texts themselves - as a philosophy of art, a special philosophy whose epistemic object is "art". In this connection it is easily shown that in the most outstanding authors (Dubos, Batteux, Diderot, Burke...) it came into being as critical reflection which, with privileged and exemplary reference to what people had begun some time before to call "fine art", and then simply "art", had as its theme a preintellectual condition, an aesthetic condition precisely, of experience in general; and hence that aesthetics is rather a mode of thought which prepares critical philosophy and in which the latter, with Kant, is fulfilled. What characterises critical thinking is indeed the awareness that philosophy has no neutral locus (really a nonlocus) of its own which is external to experience, but is possible only within experience. Therefore the primeval condition of thought cannot be intellectual. But precisely this awareness is typical of aesthetics and of art itself, as, starting from a certain moment up to the present day, but not necessarily in the future too, they are confederated. It is not by chance that in Kant's third Critique, the origin and foundation of all the most significant modern aesthetics, critical reflection and aesthetic reflection complement one another.

Ernesto Grassi: Hölderlin and becoming as demise
The analysis of the speculative meaning of a fragment written by Hölderlin in 1790 (Becoming as demise: Das Werden im Vergehen ) can help not only to understand Hölderlin's ideas better (and hence clarify the philosophical meaning of Romanticism face to face with German, Hegelian idealism) but also to identify metaphorical, poetical activity as a primeval and ineradicable experience in our existence. Hölderlin connects being and time both with the problem of language and with that of the beautiful and art in giving meanings to what appears. Only in living as enacting metaphor, "metapherein", art - and not in the preeminence of logicorational thought - is the foundation of meaning, of what appears in existence.

Aldo Trione: Thinking about poetry
«The imagination is the most "scientific" of faculties, it alone comprehends universal analogy, or what mystical religion calls correspondence». Baudelaire wrote this to Tousenel. In this sentence there is an exemplary exposition of a particular idea of "poiesis" as an event produced by reason and calculation, living within arabesques regulated by symmetry and order. Here harmony is achieved though never fully achieved, because in it there survives despair and inner contradiction. Hence harmony is confederated as a "telos" to pursue, as a "problem", in which everything is questioned: shapes, figures. And in it a match is played out which is known to be lost from the outset.

Renato Barilli: The arts: a valuation at the end of the century
Undoubtedly we have the impression today that we are living through the final moment of a great cultural cycle, and so we are led to take stock of the situation. But where can we start? The starting points close to us gradually prove insufficient, and thus, moving further and further back, we seem inevitably to come to the great moment of the watershed in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Of course, in this connection school textbooks tell us that in those years the modern age ended and the contemporary age began. These are vague and equivocal terms, also being interchangeable. I propose to replace "contemporary" with the less ambiguous term "postmodern". Also I draw on a "strong" relationship between artistic facts, cultural facts in general and technology in the same historical period. Hence, we can state that the contemporary (postmodern) age began and developed in relation to electromagnetism. Speaking more specifically about art, in the late eighteenth century two tendencies arose which were opposed in a polar manner and were destined to succeed one another later: explosion (Turner) and implosion, or revivalism, the use of past styles, preferably remote ones, so as to bring back in the characteristics of the archaic and the «taste of the primitives». The neoclassical men and the romantics fought against one another with quotations. A datum confusing the diagnostic picture is the return of modernity, immediately after the revolutionary proposals of Turner on the one hand and Füssli, Blake, David and Canova on the other. Thus contemporary (postmodern) art had to start again with Cézanne, almost a century later, never to stop again, until today.

Gillo Dorfles: The arts at the end of the millennium
The situation of art - not only the visual arts, but also music, dancing, theatre - at the end of the millennium faces us with a contradictory choice: on the one hand the advent of new electronic media which have opened up totally new possibilities both for painting (video and computer art) and above all for television and cinema; on the other hand, a revolt against these expressive means which are a prey to technology, and the attempt to establish a new phase in the mannature relationship (and one should consider the revival of interest in the body - "Leib", not "Körper" - as an aesthetic instrument, in dancing, in Tanztheater, in body art) and the rebirth of artisanry and handicraft in the lesser arts as well as in painting. From all this there emerges the mead to distinguish between "modern" art, which is usually seen as starting in the 18th century (according to the usual scholastic distinctions) but has to end with the advent of the historic avantgardes when there is the beginning of the art usually defined as "contemporary". The latter, however, is to be distinguished from "postmodern", beginning around the seventies, whose critical points lie in revival phenomena (quotation, neoromantic music), while in the renewed interest I mentioned in body-art and the new contact with nature one can make out the beginning of a phase subsequent to the postmodern and clearly distinguished from it, which I have defined "neomodern".

Appendix: Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgrunde aller schönen Wissenschaften (Introduction)
Here for the first time in Italian there is presented the "Introduction" to the Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (1745) by Georg Friedrich Meier, an alumnus of Gottlieb Baumgarten, who was the founder of the aesthetic "new science". It is to Meier's text, which collects and develops the lectures of the master, that we owe the first spread of the theoretical foundations of the new aesthetic discipline and a first systematic articulation of the principles of "fine knowledge". But Meier is not a mere "divulger" of aesthetics. In addition to the specific theoretical and systematic contents and the investigation of some passages which remain unresolved in the lectures of Baumgarten (who, in turn, stimulated by the work done by his alumnus in divulging his work, in 1750-1758 was to write his own Aesthetics), Meier's rich text for the first time questions the anthropological primacy of aesthetics with respect to other forms of knowledge and its capacity to be fully comprehensive, thus inaugurating that season in eighteenthcentury German thought which was to culminate in the great speculation by Idealism. The "Introduction" to the Anfangsgründe brings together, in a sort of compendium, the articulation of the system of the theoretical contexts in which the new science is applicable.