Franzini Elio

Elio Franzini (Milan, 1956) is a full professor of Aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities and Philosophy of the Università di Milano

He served as PRIN guarantor for Area 11 in 2009 and as GEV – Area 11 for the VQR in 2012–13. From 2004 to 2010, he was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Philosophy at the Università di Milano, having previously served as Head of the Degree Programme in Communication Sciences from 2000 to 2004. From 2011 to 2012, he was Vice-Rector for Planning and Academic Services at the Università di Milano.
From 2005 to 2010, he served as Chair of the Conference of Deans of the Faculties of Arts and Philosophy. In 2009, he was a member of the Ministerial Commission for the new Regulations on university teacher training. From 2013 to 2015, he was a member of the Evaluation Committee of the University of Life and Health Sciences in Milan. In 2015, he was a member of the Evaluation Committee of the IUSS in Pavia. Since March 2015, he has been President of the Italian Society of Aesthetics (SIE). Since October 2015, he has been a member of the Academic Senate of the Università di Milano.

He is a member of numerous editorial boards, including: “Lebenswelt”, “Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica”, “Studi di estetica”, “Aesthetica preprint”, “Estetica”, “Sensibilia”, “Adultità, a biannual journal on adulthood and educational processes”, “Le parole della filosofia”, “Materiali di Estetica”, “Ikon. Forms and Processes of Communication”, “Leitmotiv”, “Chiasmi International”, “Aisthesis”. He edits the series “Discorso, Figura”, Milan; co-editor of “Il dodecaedro”, an online series of philosophical texts. He has been invited to deliver courses, lectures and supervise doctoral thesis discussions at numerous Italian and foreign universities and cultural institutions. He is a member of the scientific committees of numerous publishing series.
He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo in Modena, the International Centre for Aesthetic Studies, the “Corrente” Foundation, and the Governing Council of the “Fondazione Luzzatto”. He is a full member of the Lombard Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts and a member of the jury for the “Bagutta” Literary Prize.

He graduated in theoretical philosophy in 1979 under the supervision of Giovanni Piana and Dino Formaggio. In 1984, he became a research fellow in Aesthetics at the University of Milan. In 1992, he was appointed as an associate professor at the University of Udine. In 1994, he was appointed as an associate professor at the University of Milan. In 2000, he was successful in the competitive selection process for a full professorship at the University of Milan, where he was immediately appointed and where he teaches Theories of Representation and the Image and Aesthetics.

His research immediately focused, following the tradition of the Milanese school, on phenomenology, which he explored in terms of its historical and theoretical connections, with particular reference to the themes of artistic construction, the symbol and the image. His early research centred on an in-depth examination of certain foundational problems of phenomenological aesthetics, with specific attention to the themes of the constitution of feeling, temporality and the aesthetic object. He subsequently turned his attention to a phenomenology of artistic creation, also exploring the relationships between artistic expression and the theory of the passions.

Alongside his interests in the phenomenology of affect, he has conducted various studies on the historical origins of aesthetics from the 18th century onwards, that is, from the century in which the discipline of aesthetics itself was first established. The aim here has been to highlight how eighteenth-century aesthetic research emerged within a cultural context characterised both by the legacy of seventeenth-century rhetoric and by the philosophical, artistic and anthropological debates that unfolded during the Age of Enlightenment.

Presenting itself as a grand dialogue between reason and passion, between the animal and the spiritual, between faith in history and pessimistic unease, aesthetics in this century explores the possibilities and limits of nature and humanity, weaving together and establishing, in this quest, all those conceptual nodes (from beauty to the sublime, from imagination to taste, and on to genius and sentiment) that would constitute the historical heritage of aesthetics right up to the present day. Moreover, the intellectual journey within the philosophical problem of feeling—whose main protagonists were Hume, Kant and Husserl, as well as the essential nodes of aesthetics between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—has made it possible to construct a sort of ‘psychological’ or ‘anthropological’ horizon from which to explore the foundational bases of aesthetics. The problems of sensation, feeling and common sense, in fact, frame the epistemological sense of aesthetics, that is, the role it plays in a general theory of knowledge. In this context, aesthetics embodies a specific, pre-categorical ‘mode’ of reason, which reveals its meaning by manifesting the cognitive significance of sensory experience: at the origin of knowledge, at the origin of science, there is a ‘common feeling’ in which doxa and episteme meet.

An analysis of this theme—namely, the role of aesthetic and sensory representation in the general processes of knowledge—has led to an investigation into the meaning of the image and the imagination, and the symbolic processes associated with them, which together form the basis for a “phenomenology of the invisible”. The theme of “representation” and its connections with language and with rhetorical and artistic expression from the eighteenth century up to the phenomenological tradition lies at the heart of his current interests.

Among his publications, the following monographs are particularly noteworthy:
1. Gusto e disgusto, Milano, Nike, 2000 2. Fenomenologia dell’invisibile. Al di là dell’immagine, Milano, Cortina, 2001 3. La fenomenologia (con E. Costa e P. Spinicci), Torino, Einaudi, 2002 4. Il teatro, la festa e la rivoluzione. Su Rousseau e gli enciclopedisti, Palermo, Aesthetica preprint, 2002. 5. Verità dell’immagine, Milano, Editrice Il Castoro, 2004 6. Estetica dell’espressione (con C. Cappelletto), Firenze, Le Monnier, 2005. 7. L’altra ragione. Sensibilità, immaginazione e forma artistica, Milano, Il Castoro, 2007 8. I simboli e l’invisibile. Figure e forme del pensiero simbolico, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2008 9. Elogio dell’Illuminismo, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2009 10. La rappresentazione dello spazio, Milano, Mimesis, 2011 11. Introduzione all’estetica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2012 12. Filosofia della crisi, Milano, Guerini, 2015 13. Moderno e postmoderno. Un bilancio, Milano, Cortina, 2018