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Wer das Tiefite gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste
- F. Hölderlin, Sokrates und Aicibiades
The Italian philosopher Franco Volpi died on 14 April 2009 after being struck by a car while out cycling in the Berici hills, not far from his home in Vicenza. He was 57 years old. He was Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Padova.
Franco was born in 1952 in Vicenza and was educated at the Pigafetta classical high school, where he was a standout pupil of Giuseppe Faggin. Faggin was a well-known Neo-Platonic scholar in Italy, and Franco learned from him the importance of being faithful and attentive when interpreting the great texts and the importance of having the necessary philological tools to do so. After leaving school, Franco went on to study philosophy at the University of Padova with the world-famous Aristotle scholar Enrico Berti, graduating in 1975 with a dissertation on Heidegger, Brentano, and Aristotle. He had a precocious talent from the very beginning and was appointed researcher at the age of 28 and associate professor by the age of 35. At the same time, Franco was a philosopher of the world and transcended the petty squabbles and infighting of Italian university politics and was visiting professor at many prestigious universities across Europe, North America, and South America.
Among his most influential works are Heidegger e Brentano. L'aristotelismo e il problema dell'univocità dell'essere neUa formazione filosofica del giovane Martin Heidegger (Padova: Cedam, 1976); La rinascita della filosofia pratica in Germania (Albano Terme: Francisci, 1980); Heidegger e Aristotele (Padova: Daphne, 1984); Sulla fortuna del concetto di decadence nella cultura tedesca: Nietzsche e le sue fonti francesi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995); and // nichilismo (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996). In the English-speaking world, Franco was best known for his work on Heidegger's 'ontologization' of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and for his provocative reading of Being and Time as a translation of the Ethics. In addition to his groundbreaking works on the influence of Aristotle on the young Heidegger, on Nietzsche and the problem of nihilism, and on the so-called rehabilitation of practical philosophy in Neo-Aristotelianism, he was also the translator and editor of...