Abstract

The paper takes its cue from the collection of writings in honor of Sergio Moravia, published in 2022, Nei labirinti dell’esistenza (In the Labyrinths of Existence, ed. by R. Roni), to offer a concise survey of his wide-ranging interests as a historian and philosopher who has reinterpreted the canonical body-mind relationship and linguistic-hermeneutic and «personological» analysis to consider the mental not as a single dimension and to enhance its «symbolic figure» irreducible to nature. This has enabled a dialogue with philosophers and scientists, from Rorty to Ryle, from Habermas to Bruce Aune, as well as a reinterpretation of La Mettrie’s man-machine model in the light of the «vitalistic and organicistic» positions expressed since the 1850s in Europe. Thus highly original reconstruction of the culture of the médecins-philosophes have matured from the pages of the Tramonto dell’illuminismo to the writings on Vico and Vichianism in Filosofia e scienze umane nell’età dei lumi.