In front of a work of art, we admire beauty or other aesthetic qualities, but the essence of the work of art lies in its origin. Through a palaeoanthropological investigation into the conditions that made art possible, we suggest that in a work of art we essentially understand its being produced by human beings. I call this understanding 'radical understanding': it is the minimal content of all artistic production, the reminder of its historical character.

Moving from Kant, and ending with Hegel, I explore the idea that habits are not contrary to aesthetic experience and that aesthetic habits shape taste as an aesthetic sensus communis. As such it has a normative and a socio-political dimension, as argued by Hanna Arendt and Gianni Vattimo. I defend the proposed theoretical hypothesis through an articulated historical-conceptual discussion of the different notions involved in my argument, obviously with particular regard to the notion of habit.

This article explores the relationship between aesthetics and hermeneutics at the turn of the 18^th and the 19^th century, especially in the philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the forefather of philosophical hermeneutics. The first paragraph introduces some important categories of historical hermeneutics through the perspective of Friedrich Schlegel, with whom Schleiermacher formed a strong intellectual friendship. Schlegel's influence is considered as emblematic of the Romantic sensibility animating Schleiermacher's hermeneutics. The second paragraph delves into Schleiermacher's own theory of interpretation, with a priority to the aspects that are more sympathetic with his theory of art. The last paragraph draws some final remarks on the meaning of the Romantic sensibility for today's hermeneutics.

What is a work of art? According to Gadamer, the answer to this question opens up a series of issues, not limited to the aesthetic realm, that form the basis of the project of a philosophical hermeneutics. Only an understanding of the ontology of the work of art can explain the experience we have of history and language. The work of art thus reveals itself to be the gateway to philosophical hermeneutics and its problems.In this paper, I examine the fundamental features of Gadamer's critique of modern aesthetic reflection, which, by separating art and truth, is incapable of describing the human experience of a work of art.

The critique of subjectivism in modern aesthetic theory is a well-known theme in contemporary hermeneutic philosophy, perhaps most famously represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer's opening arguments in Truth and Method. In this context, the hermeneutic rehabilitation of the link between art and truth, and therefore of the experience of art as an experience of truth, aims not only to correct the modern approach to aesthetics as essentially based on the distinction between the "subjective" and the "objective," but is more fundamentally a way to radically rethink the very idea and history of the human spirit. In this paper I examine one of the principal sources for this development in the work of Martin Heidegger. In the first part of the paper, I show that the methodologically constructive and formal character of Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity issues into the demand for a critique of the concept of "spirit" at the end of Being and Time. In the second part of the paper, I examine Heidegger's interpretation of art in The Origin of the Work of Art as remarkably coherent continuation of the critique of "spirit" as main task of his hermeneutics after Being and Time. My claim is that Heidegger's considerations about art as "event of truth" are therefore not limited to aesthetic theory but imply a theory of history and of the human spirit as essentially historical.

Piedmontese philosopher Luigi Pareyson played a major role in the Italian context of the twentieth century, developing a highly original philosophical perspective. The present paper focuses on his aesthetics, his hermeneutics, and the relationship between the two. After a first introductory section on Pareyson's life and on the different stages of his philosophical reflection, the article turns to Pareyson' aesthetic theory of formativity, with a focus on the aspects that most clearly enucleate its hermeneutic bases. The third section examines Pareyson's explicit contribution to hermeneutics, by drawing attention to the fact that art best exemplifies the dynamics that are at work in any act of interpretation. The fourth section takes into account the concept of "persona" as a trait d'union that runs through Pareyson's whole philosophy, shedding further light on the interpretative process as it involves both artworks and truth. Ultimately, the paper aims to show how in Pareyson's thought the hermeneutics, although outlined more than fifteen years after the aesthetics, logically precedes and underpins it.

The aim of this article is to reveal the relevance of aesthetics in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, with particular respect to the concept of utopia as presented in the Lectures published in 1986. Utopia is relevant to aesthetics at three levels. First, utopia is a literary genre and as such it shares with the artistic sphere some formal and content-related criteria. Second, utopia is an imaginative variation of reality, therefore it shares with fiction some transformative power with respect to ordinary experience. As works of fiction, utopias are always historical, singular, and creative, therefore resist sociological reduction. Third, Saint-Simon and especially Fourier's utopias put aesthetic life at the core of their reformation project, which allows Ricoeur to emphasize the role of passions in the good life. In Ricoeur's account, utopia, for its cognitive, ethical, political, and aesthetic aspects, results in an ambivalent construct that counters the modern tendence to separate and oppose science and art.

Contemporary philosophical hermeneutics has its roots in the field of aesthetics. Among its authors, Gianni Vattimo is the most radical interpreter of this position. His early book, entitled Art's Claim to Truth, emphasizes this primacy of aesthetics with a particular focus on the artistic practice.The present essay reconstructs Vattimo's reading of early European avant-gardes and discusses what Art's Claim to Truth calls the ontological meaning of the artistic revolutions between the 19^th and 20^th centuries.