“Just as we saw a moment ago, even before opening it, this volume offered a shape and a colour: a green square immediately evokes a gaming table and it is here that I am now going to arrange the various and changing faces of a solitaire”. Giulio Paolini, author of this artist’s book, guides the reader through his works from the beginning, introducing him to a more “strictly personal” knowledge of his enigmatic work. In addition to a rich bibliography, the book includes historical texts by the artist and others that have never been published before.

“With rationality we must imperatively go as far as it can take us. Since it does not lead us to the ultimate goal, that is, to know what is real, we must then rely on less certain guides.” A fundamental text by Bernard d’Espagnat, physicist, philosopher and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Paris-Orsay. In an authentic and direct way, d’Espagnat investigates and verifies the very foundations of physics and the relationship between it and the philosophy of knowledge.

This collection includes the writings of the German artist, born in Munich in 1880, who founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky around 1911. The writings, arranged chronologically from 1910 to 1915, comprise articles and notes on art theory and politics, texts that appeared in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac and writings from the war period in which Marc was a volunteer participant from 1914 to March 1916, the date of his death. These writings are a very important key to understanding the panorama of European art in the age of the avant-garde, the fundamental climate for the artistic development of our century. Permeated with important issues (the rejection of Renaissance perspective, the importance of synthesis and constructiveness in composition, the expressive value of Kandinsky and the ‘savages’, the relationship between art and science, popular art and the visual value of art, the transcendent meaning of war, the future of Europe), the narrative is always oracular and visionary. The deep philosophical content, which links in with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the polemic with Tolstoy’s aesthetics and the intensity of expression make it meaningful and moving. The selection is completed by a commemoration written by Wassily Kandinsky on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the author’s

An important essay by the well-known French biophysicist and philosopher of Algerian origin, this volume offers a meditation on the living that goes beyond biology to cross the sciences of nature, the sciences of man, the experience of Jewish thought, life and death, towards a new knowledge of the world that has to choose: ethics or biology?

The fact that the ‘law of desire’ can only find a limit in the ‘desire for law’ is not just a play on words: it is one of those necessarily equivocal expressions with which language must strive to illuminate the paradoxical structure of ‘moral discourse’.

Vladimir Jankélevitch (1903-1985) taught at the universities of Toulouse, Lille and the Sorbonne. His philosophical works include: H. Bergson, 1931, L'odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling, 1933, Traité des vertus, 1949, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, 1957, La mort, 1966. A pianist and musicologist, he has written essays on Liszt, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Recent translations of La musica e l'ineffabile and La coscienza ebraica have been published in Italian.