The curse intends to follow the concept of the body in the formulations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, in fact, the recent interest in the theme of life from biopolitics to the biologization of knowledge invites us to reflect today on the link between biology and thought that just between the end of the eighteenth century finds its first significant manifestation. On the other hand, the theme of corporeity is one of the most burning issues of our time, both for the progressive loss of value of human lives in tragedies related to migration, as well as the sacrifice of bodies (returned central in religious and ideological struggles that mark the contemporary horizon), to arrive, finally, the role that new technologies give to a corporeity at the same time increasingly virtualized through the network and increasingly (hyper-)developed through a variety of enhancement techniques.
The themes of life and of the body, beyond contemporary projections, find one of the original (and main) theoretical junctions in the decisive years of European philosophical elaboration and in particular in German philosophy. Starting from this assumption, the course will start from an analysis of the conception of corporeity and of life in the philosophy of the German area (from Kant to Nietzsche), then go on to build a broader atlas of the relationship that modern philosophical culture has established with corporeity and with the concept of life.