The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "Ernesto Grassi and Twentieth-Century Italian Philosophical Culture" (Ernesto Grassi e la cultura filosofica italiana del Novecento) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics (Palermo, May 31 - June 1, 1996).

In the introduction, Luigi Russo explains that the aim of the volume is to illustrate some of the central themes of Grassi's (1902-1991) philosophical research and at the same time to underline their rich vitality.

Massimo Marassi ("Ernesto Grassi and the Experience of Telos") shows how Grassi advances an original interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy that privileges the eschatological dimension of his ontology: being is interpreted as different from Being, and therefore it is only partially revealed and also always in process. From this starting point, and in his own personal way, Grassi opposes a teleology to Heidegger's eschatology: he elaborates an experience of the "telos" that informs life in its entirety and that represents the intrinsic and constitutive norm both of morality and of politics.

Donatella Di Cesare ("Metaphor and Ontological Difference: Grassi vs. Heidegger?") problematizes the terms of the rupture between Grassi and Heidegger, with the publication of Letter on Humanism. She investigates the influence of Heidegger's notion of "ontological difference" on Grassi's philosophy of metaphor, but she also underlines that Grassi's great achievement was to identify in metaphor itself the possibility of overcoming metaphysics and clarifies the limits of a tragic ontology of metaphor like the one Grassi outlines in his last work.

Carlo Gentili ("Ernesto Grassi: Between the Philosophy of Myth and Demythicization") focuses on the fundamental problem of the relationship between "demonstrative" and "indicative" thought, which Grassi poses in Kunst und Mythos. Since, according to Grassi, "mythos" is the foundation of "logos" and is therefore interpreted in light of the history of the "logos", how is it possible to preserve the autonomy of mytos and, together with it, the autonomy of rhetorics and poetics? Grassi's solution is to study myth from the perspective of demythicization, analyzing progressive separation of art from its original sacral function, a process that is articulated in Aristotle's Poetics.

Leonardo Amoroso ("From Aristotle to Vico: On Grassi and Myth") starts from the premise that Vico, in his Scienza Nuova deploys with cleverness notions and doctrines from Aristotle's Poetics in order to articulate a hermeneutics of myth and an anthropology of the mind and language of primitive man. Amoroso then proceeds to argue that Grassi, who is "influenced" by Vico, is aware of the risk of aestheticism (a possible consequence of the Aristotelean secularization) and therefore goes back from poetry to myth, linking it closely with the issues of history and language.

Giuseppe Modica ("Beyond Heidegger and Vico: On Ernesto Grassi's Philosophical Perspective"), through an analysis of the meaning and role of metaphor, shows how Grassi's philosophical perspective differs from both Vico's and Heidegger's. Not only does Grassi eschew the mere repetition of their philosophical tenets, but he also promotes a discourse of his own. This discourse may be considered post-Vico and post-Heidegger (in a theoretical, rather than merely chronological, sense), since Grassi carries on the work of the previous philosophers and moves towards the prefiguration of a recovery of the tragic dimension of existence.

The volume closes with an "Appendix", edited by Emilio Mattioli, that features reprint of the important "Preface to the Second Edition" of Grassi's Die Theorie des Schönen in der Antike.