Gianfranco Marrone’s Foreword

This book is based on a series of seminars held by Paolo Fabbri at the Steri University headquarters of Palermo from 25 to 27 November 1996, organised by the Sigma-Tau Foundation and the Italian Laterza publishing house. In the 1990s, Pino Donghi, Secretary General of the Foundation, asked a group of distinguished intellectuals, philosophers, critics and scientists to give a series of ‘Italian Lectures’, somewhat in imitation of the ‘American Lectures’ that Italo Calvino was supposed to have given a few years earlier at Harvard. Prominent international figures, including Wolf Lepenies, Gianni Vattimo, Francisco J. Varela, Franco Voltaggio, John Barrow, Ilya Prygogine, Hilary Putnam, Isabelle Stengers, André Green, Aldo Gargani, Jerome Bruner, Remo Bodei and many others, were invited to prepare a series of lectures over three consecutive days at an Italian university and to publish the results in a specific editorial series that eventually included more than 25 titles, many of which were translated into several languages.