Since 2024, I have been collaborating with the editors of the series The Works of Emanuele Severino on the international publication project dedicated to the work of Emanuele Severino, widely regarded as the most important Italian philosopher of the twentieth century. This ambitious editorial enterprise, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in the United Kingdom, represents a major effort to make Severino’s thought accessible to an English-speaking readership for the first time in a systematic and scholarly form. Within this project, I have completed the translation and the critical introduction to several of his books in their English editions, working closely with the editorial team to ensure both philological accuracy and conceptual fidelity. Engaging with Severino’s philosophical language at this level of depth has been an intellectually demanding and deeply formative experience, one that has allowed me to contribute directly to the global circulation of a body of thought that has profoundly shaped contemporary Italian philosophy. Further details on the individual volumes and on the ongoing development of the project are available through the dedicated section linked here.
About the Series
This book series presents for the first time in the English language the translation of the most important works written by the major twentieth-century Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino. The volumes are translated and edited by scholars and philosophers with an extended knowledge of Severino’s theoretical apparatus who provide critical contributions, introductions, and explanatory glosses.
The series publishes Severino’s theoretical volumes as well as his more interdisciplinary books, and will be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to readers of cultural and critical theory, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science.
Series Editors:
Giulio Goggi, Editor of the Journal of Fundamental Ontology, and vice-president of ASES (Society for Emanuele Severino Studies)
Damiano Sacco, ICI Berlin, Germany
Ines Testoni, University of Padova, Italy
Translations available for purchase
Bloomsbury Publishing UK, SEE HERE.
ISBN | 9781350543515
War: Violence and Technics in the West
Drawing on a broad range of sources, from Heraclitus to 20th-century grassroots movements, Italy’s foremost philosopher calls for a new way of thinking that could lead the West to perpetual peace. War, for Severino, is not merely the manifestation of conflict through violence to resolve disputes between nations or fractions. Rather it is a mode of thought deeply embedded in the foundations of Western civilisation. Highlighting the divisive and isolating mechanisms that the West uses to conceptualize their bases of power, War shows that this divisive thought is so intrinsic to Western philosophy that even critiques of war are warlike. For peace to be possible, we need more then ceasefires; we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the history of Western thought.
Originally written in the geopolitical context of the 1990s, Severino’s text retains an extraordinary urgency at a time when the reality of war seems increasingly insistent. Bringing this relevance to focus, this volume includes a comprehensive introduction by translator Federico Divino, which carefully contextualises War historically and politically, whilst also situating it in relation to Severino's wider philosophical oeuvre.
An accessible book, free from the more complex logical and metaphysical lexicons central to some of Severino’s other works, this is a must-read for anyone interested in why war happens and what may be needed to stop it.