Giuseppe Varnier

Biography

Giuseppe MA VarnierHe was born in Genoa and studied, before and after graduation, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, at the University of Pisa, and, with DAAD grants, at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum and the Hegel-Archiv. He first became interested in both logical-formal and epistemological aspects of Hegel's Logic and dialectic, and of the concept of "history of self-consciousness" in German idealism. He discussed his doctoral thesis, on Hegel, Hölderlin, ancient and modern skepticism, in 1987 at SNS, with Pièrre-Jean Labarrière, Remo Bodei and Giuseppe Cantillo as supervisors, Claudio Cesa as Director of Studies. He spent research periods at Hegel-Archiv (with Otto Pöggeler), and also with scholarships at the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University),visiting fellow . He was first scholarship holder in Naples and Frankfurt am Main of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies. He was able to attend seminars and courses, among others, by Karl-Otto Apel, Reinhard Lauth, Jürgen Habermas, and then by Robert S. Cohen, Jaakko Hintikka and Joseph Margolis. In Siena he has followed for years the courses and seminars of the PhD in Cognitive Sciences, also participating in educational activities. After having been a professor of philosophy, pedagogy and psychology in the Magisterial Institutes, he taught or held seminars in the Universities of Florence, Siena, and, in recent years, at the Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, at Carl von Ossietsky Universität Oldenburg and at the University of California at Irvine. He has organized, or participated in, the organization of more than a dozen national and international conferences. He has participated as a member or local coordinator in various PRIN groups since 1992. From 1995 to date, he taught History of Philosophy (Modern and Contemporary), for a brief period Philosophy of History and Political Philosophy, and General Epistemology, also in Siena. He has taught in the Ph.D. in Philosophy Arezzo-Siena and has collaborated in the one in Cognitive Sciences. He has historically and theoretically occupied himself with conscience and self-consciousness, indicality, quasi-indicality and attitudes de se , and in general with problems at the intersection between philosophy of language, knowledge and philosophy of the mind. He is also preparing a series of contributions on the theory of knowledge and relativism (the first volume, on intersubjectivity and foundationalism, is being published) and is currently working on a collection of essays on Self-Consciousness and Language , soon to be published .

Research Interest

Philosophy and History of Science