Riccardo Pozzo

Biography

Graduated in philosophy at the University of Milan in 1983, Riccardo Pozzo was a disciple of Mario Dal Pra, Wilhelm Risse, and Norbert Hinske. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Saarland University and Habilitation in 1995 at University of Trier. In 1996 he went to the U.S. to teach Kant and Hegel at the School of Philosophy of CUA in Washington, D.C. In 2003 he came back to Italy to take up the chair of the History of Philosophy at Università di Verona.

From 2009 to 2012 he succeeded to Tullio Gregory at the direction of the Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and History of Ideas at the National Research Council of Italy. Since 2013 he has been directing the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council of Italy. In 2012 he was elected a member of the Institut International de Philosophie.

Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on ribbon, he is currently serving as expert of the Horizon 2020 Program Committee Configuration Research Infrastructures, member of the Scientific Review Group for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation, and chairman of the 24th World Congress of Philosophy Program Committee, organized by the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie in Beijing 2018.

Research

Historian of Philosophy and author of monographs on Aristotelianism, the history of logic (from the Renaissance to Kant and Hegel), the history of ideas and the history of universities, Pozzo has pushed forward the creation of research infrastructures for an enhanced comprehension of philosophical and scientific texts that have shaped the cultural heritage of mankind. Specific characteristic of Pozzo’s approach to lexicography during his tenure at the Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and History of Ideas is the use of IT for linguistic and textual data documentation and elaboration in Ancient Greek, English, French, German, Latin, and Italian.

In recent years Pozzo has been considering possibilities and limits of an intercultural history of philosophy. According to him today, intellectual history and philosophy hardly talk to each other. The subjects are nonetheless the same ones: thought and its history. Therefore he promotes an intercultural model to the history of philosophy, which begins from a critical consideration of this nonspeaking. In his books and articles he puts forward examples of corpora of philosophical texts that talk to each other, which is a new trend made possible by the advances of state-of-the-art lexicography. With migration among the key issues at the top of public and academic agendas worldwide a re-consideration is urgent of the migrant practices of transfer of organizing principles and conditions for developing competences to act in multicultural settings, and ideas, which—as Arthur O. Lovejoy used to say—are the most migratory things in the world.