Emilio Garroni

Emilio Garroni (14 December 1925 – 5 August 2005) was an Italian philosopher and writer.

Biography

He began his career at RAI, where he had entered — due to a happy intuition of Filiberto Guala, general director at the time — together with a group of young university professors, including Leone Piccioni, Antonio Santoni Rugiu and Luigi Silori, as an interviewer and author of broadcasts on artistic subjects. He flanked this work with the intellectual work of criticism and reflection on art, thanks also to his connections with the 1950's artistic world, also writing presentations and art catalogs.

Since 1951, Garroni was a voluntary assistant professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the chair of Ugo Spirito at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome. Until that moment at the margins of the academic life, with La crisi semantica delle arti ("The semantic crisis of arts") Garroni became professor of Aesthetics in 1964. He was appointed full professor of this discipline at the same Faculty in 1973. Here began his thirty years of experience that will lead to the renewal of Italian aesthetics after Croce, culminating in an innovative translation of Kant's Critique of Judgment, aimed at emphasizing the co-participation of aesthetic and epistemological issues.

Garroni was also a writer (author of short stories and novels), and painter. In 2006, he presented to the public at the "Sala Santa Rita" in Rome, his self-portrait, a work made around 1983–84.

He edited prefaces to the works of Rudolf Arnheim, Pierre Macherey, Octave Mannoni, György Lukács, Cesare Brandi, Mikel Dufrenne, Roman Jakobson, and the Prague linguistic circle, and contributed to the journal Rassegna di filosofia (1951–56) (occasionally elsewhere), the film journals Cinema Nuovo and Filmcritica, and the Enciclopedia Einaudi.

Among the artists presented by Garroni there are Silvio Benedetto, Franco Bottari, Mario Melis, Giannetto Fieschi, Sergio Vacchi, Alfredo Del Greco etc.

He died in Rome on August 5, 2005 and the funeral oration was held at Villa Mirafiori, seat of the Faculty of Philosophy.

In the aftermath of his death, friends, students and colleagues decided to found an association, the CiEG, Cattedra Internazionale Emilio Garroni, to make his thought known and to give a follow-up to the philosophical investigations on the topics he addressed.

Thought

According to Garroni, aesthetics is a "non-special philosophy" whose task should not be limited to the study of artistic expressions ("the beautiful"), but is aimed at a vision and a "construction" of the world based on the experience of meaning that, for Garroni, continues to have its exemplary manifestation in the arts.

In the words of his colleague Tullio De Mauro, "as Garroni explains in Riflessioni sulla Critica del Giudizio ("Reflections on the Critique of Judgment") of 1976 (subtitle of Estetica ed Epistemologia) what should be claimed is the epistemological scope of Kant's reflections, which transcend the empirical state of the sciences of his time and live operating in the best of the twentieth-century addresses, perhaps unaware of this."

Works

• La crisi semantica delle arti (1964)
• Il mito negativo e la pittura di Vacchi (1964)
• Semiotica ed estetica. L'eterogeneità del linguaggio e il linguaggio cinematografico (1968)
• Progetto di semiotica. Messaggi artistici e linguaggi non-verbali (1973)
• Pinocchio uno e bino (1975)
• Estetica ed epistemologia. Riflessioni sulla "Critica del Giudizio" (1976)
• Ricognizione della semiotica (1977)
• Estetica e linguistica (1983; editor)
• Senso e paradosso. L'estetica, filosofia non speciale (1986)
• Estetica. Uno sguardo-attraverso (1992)
• Osservazioni sul mentire e altre conferenze (1994)
• L'estetica, filosofia non speciale (1995)
• L'arte e l'altro dall'arte. Saggi di estetica e di critica (1995)
• Senso e storia dell'estetica: studi offerti a Emilio Garroni per il suo settantesimo compleanno (1995; edited by Pietro Montani)
• "Interpretare." In: Mario Lavagetto, ed., Il testo letterario. Istruzioni per l'uso (1996), pp. 245–82.
• Immanuel Kant, Critica della facoltà di giudizio (1999; editor, with Hansmichael Hohenegger)
• Immagine linguaggio figura: osservazioni e ipotesi (2005)
• Scritti sul cinema: pubblicati dalla rivista "Filmcritica" (1967–2004) (2006; edited by Edoardo Bruno & Alessia Cervini)
• Creatività (2010; with an introduction by Paolo Virno)

Fiction

• La macchia gialla (1962)
• Dissonanzen quartett. Una storia (1990)
• Racconti morali, o Della vicinanza e della lontananza (1992)
• Sulla morte e sull'arte: racconti morali (1994)

External links

• CIEG