Giancarlo MAGNANO SAN LIO

Giancarlo Magnano San Lio deals mainly with the history of culture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to German historicism (Dilthey), the problem of the intersection between human sciences and nature sciences and the relations between cultural models, with specific attention to the relationship between East and West and to the issue of human rights in a globalized society. Particular attention has been given to the relationship between philology, history and philosophy in the contemporary debate on the human sciences and their relationship with the exact sciences. In this sense, his research has focused on the history and the articulation of the Weltanschauung idea between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an area in which the repeated parables of birth, maturation and crisis of some important political-social and cultural models of contemporary Europe are immediately visible.

Giancarlo Magnano San Lio has also reconstructed, working on materials previously unpublished, the figure and the work of Rudolf Haym in the cultural and political debate of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, showing the constitutive intersections between the different forms of humanistic knowledge and their impact on the process of transformation of Germany and of Europe at the time. From this point of view, he has continued to study and deepen the connections of philosophical knowledge with philology, poetry, literature, art history and other important expressions of humanistic culture.

Giancarlo Magnano San Lio has investigated, with more specific attention, some fundamental junctions of contemporary German philosophy, especially as regards crises and epistemological changes within the science debate, always keeping in the background the rapid, continuous transformation of political conditions -social, economic and cultural Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth century. With this in mind, he has looked at the evolution of European society also in comparison with the so-called 'other' cultures, in an intercultural perspective aimed at highlighting intersections, differences and repetitions in different cultural areas, often considered completely heterogeneous, when not at all strangers. Through the investigation of some authors of particular importance in the context of the contemporary historical-cultural debate (especially Dilthey, Haym, Usener, Warburg, Cassirer etc.), their fruitful dialogue and the repeated and often sudden turns that philosophical knowledge and humanistic had to record in a historical period all in all content, although of great importance and liveliness, Giancarlo Magnano San Lio has repeatedly placed critical attention, with precise philological and historiographical references, on the transformations of the European context, also in the light of the important and often tragic historical phenomena that have gone through it: in particular, the reference is to the great processes of unification of some great national states, among all Italy and Germany, to the progressive polarization of the international scenario around the two great blocks of East and West, great wars, dictatorships, mass societies and so on. All phenomena, together with other significant ones, able to re-propose the theme of cyclically proceeding in the history, in this case of the contemporary one, between peaks of development and social well-being and abysses of miseries and barbarities of different nature. A framework within which the historical-philosophical and cultural dimension could only assume the fundamental role, always assigned to it, of understanding and critical re-elaboration of the different crises and the various attempts to resolve them, constantly showing the extraordinary capacity of intelligence human, always to some extent responsible, for better or for worse, for the periodic succession of crisis of models and values and of problematic but often decisive rebirths.

Giancarlo Magnano San Lio has plotted such a segment of the complex historical-philosophical and cultural contemporary panorama by putting the accent on junctions, themes and authors considered to be significant, showing, starting from the philological-critical reproposition of texts and documents, the intersections, crisis moments and turning points.