Articles and Essays
How Evil Happens
Piece written for Aeon on the Syndrome E hypothesis: "Is Neuroscience Getting Closer to Explaining Evil Behavior?"
Thoughts Made Visible
Written for issue on "States of Mind" of Lapham’s Quarterly
A Chateau in the Loire Valley
About the restoration and redesign of a house in the Loire valley, for Architectural Digest.
Neuro News
Response to the 2016 Edge Question: What do you consider the most interesting scientific news? What makes it important?
Body and Soul
Written for Lapham´s Quarterly issue on "Flesh".
Paris, Searching for Peace
Written for New York Daily News after the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015.
The Passage from Normal to Dark
A testimonial written for Politico on the day after the Paris attacks of November 13th.
Metarepresentation
Response to the 2015 Edge Foundation Annual Question: What do you think about machines that think?
The Rights of Spring
An essay on nostalgia, for Indian Quarterly (issue 3:2, January-March 2015)
Indian Summer
A review of John Adams´s opera A Flowering Tree, in Indian Quarterly, Vol 2, Issue 4.
As A Lute Out Of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy
Piece written for The Public Domain Review.
The Curry Soup
Written for the "roundtable" blog of Lapham´s Quarterly.]
Clothes are Transparent
Written for issue n. 1 of Garage.
The Internet and Slowness
Response to the 2010 Edge Question: "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Anthologized in the resulting book, and selected as one of 8 of the 100 responses in Der Spiegel
Bach’s Art of Fugue
Written for issue 55 of Nexus on "Hope and Consolation".
Great Expectations
Piece on the history of doctors and patients, written for Lapham´s Quarterly, "Medicine" issue (Fall 2009).
Up Close and Personal
Piece on the history of personals for Lapham´s Quarterly, "Eros" issue (Winter 2009).
Wine, Body and Soul
Given at a conference on the Philosophy of Wine at Pollenzo (Piemonte), in May 2008.
Wine Psychology
Written for the first issue of a new journal on the philosophy of wine, Tacuinum Vitineum.
Speech After Long Silence: Of Poetry and Consciousness
Delivered as invited speaker to the 2005 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize Reading, Poets´ House, New York City.
Brain Scans Lie, Not You
A response to some reactions to Passions and Tempers, written in July 2007.
Melancholy and Humoural Passions in Early Modernity
Published in a French translation as "La Mélancolie et les passions humorales au début de la modernité", in the catalogue of the exhibition on melancholy shown in Paris and Berlin in 2005-06.
Alternatives in Medicine
Response to an online debate on Spiked: "Complementary and alternative medicine: Why is conventional medicine not enough?"
About "Moral Values"
This was written shortly after the 2004 US elections.
Text-e: Le texte a l’heure de l’internet
From the online symposium text-e. Edited by Gloria Origgi and Noga Arikha. With contributions by Stefana Broadbent, Francesco Cara, Roberto Casati, Roger Chartier, Umberto Eco, Jason Epstein, Stevan Harnad, Bruno Patino, Dan Sperber, Theodore Zeldin.
On "Intelligent Design"
Written in October 2005.
Computers, Speed and Us
Piece about the Internet, written for Prospect Magazine, as a counterpart to the online symposium on the impact of the internet on texts, text-e.
Book review: Undermining Man
Review of Kenan Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell us About Human Nature(London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), published in the TLS (9 February 2001).
Book review: on Thomas Willis
Review (unpublished) of Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How It Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2004), 366pp. Originally written for the NYRB.
Book review: Metaphors of Memory
Review of Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Published in the Economist, in the issue dated June 28th, 2001.
On Pellegrino Artusi, Italy’s Victorian chef
Essay (commissioned by New York Review of Books but unpublished) about the Italian cookery classic, Pellegrino Artusi´s La scienza in cucina e l´arte di mangiar bene.
Lectures and Academic
Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction
Review of book by Charles Wolfe, for HOPOS, 2017.
A New Republic of Letters?
Talk given at conference on Global Humanities, Italian Cultural Institute, New York.
Humoural Bodies and Balanced Minds
Keynote talk at conference "Situating Mental Illness: Between Scientific Certainty and Personal Narrative", ICI, Berlin, April 29th, 2011
La quête de l’équilibre: ame, vertus, humeurs
Piece on the humours published in the French journal Corps (March 2010).
"Just Life in a Nutshell": Humours as Common Sense
Paper given at a one-day symposium on "Folk Epistemologies", at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, NY, on October 26th, 2007. Published in The Philosophical Forum (Fall 2008: 39-3).
Opaque Humors, Enlightened Emotions, and the Transparent mind
Published in the journal Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (Harvard University Press), issue 51, spring 2007.
Humoural Passions and Seasoned Cares
Lecture given in 2004 at a conference at Barnard, "Medicine Across Cultures: Medicine and the Mind, 600-1000 AD".
Reason and Emotion in the Early Enlightenment
Presented in 2003, first at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, then as a University Professors Occasional Lecture at Boston University.
Of Reasons, Humours and Passions: Explanatory Structure and the Mind-Body Problem
The "philosophical manifesto" underlying Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, presented in 2002 as a luncheon-seminar at the Italian Academy, Columbia University, while at work on the humours project as a Fellow there.
Form and Function in the Early Enlightenment
An article about the relation between anatomical form and physiological function, derived from the doctoral thesis and published in Perspectives on Science, 14:2 (2006), pp. 153-189.
Deafness, Ideas and the Language of Thought in the Late 1600s
Published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13: 2 (2005), pp. 233-262; based on a chapter from the doctoral thesis.
Adam’s Spectacles: Nature, Mind and Body in the Age of Mechanism
Full text of the (unpublished) doctoral thesis.