Pisano, Libera
Junior Fellow: March 2016–February 2017
Research Project: Linguistic Scepticism
- From Isolation to Community. Sceptical Strategies in Landauer’s Anarchy (March–August 2016)
- Limits of Language. Limits of Understanding. Linguistic Scepticism in Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein (September 2016–February 2017)
Libera Pisano’s research is structured into two main sections and deals with linguistic scepticism among pairings of German-Jewish thinkers of the last century: Mauthner/Landauer and Rosenzweig/Wittgenstein. The historical context is the so-called Sprachkrise, a complex critique of language diffused in the philosophical and literary debate before World War I. In her first six months of research, Libera Pisano analysed the logos-scepticism in Mauthner’s philosophy as the theoretical premise of the anarchist thought of Gustav Landauer by shedding light on the turn of linguistic scepticism into a political praxis and a mystical conception of community. For the second part of her research, she has chosen to investigate the different approaches of Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein as two manifestations of the constellation of Sprachkrise, which—despite their apparent divergences—is the common thread linking these different authors. Libera Pisano will attempt to show how reflection about the limits of language, the relevance of the apophatic moment, the critical attitude towards the tradition, and the new task of philosophy—the main features of both Rosenzweig’s and Wittgenstein’s thought—stem from the radical linguistic scepticism present in the cultural debate of that time.
Libera Pisano earned her PhD in theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University of Rome in 2014. She was visiting research fellow (post-doc) at the Humboldt University Berlin in 2014–15.