Alberto
FRIGO

The feeling of mortality is an essential component of human existence and experience. It would therefore seem absurd to speak of the 'invention' of such a feeling at a specific moment in the history of thought. Yet, as the history of ideas teaches us, in order for a phenomenon, even the most essential to our lives, to become visible, in order for us to be able to name and think about it, certain linguistic and conceptual conditions of possibility need to be triggered. This project aims to reconstruct how, in the European thought of the two centuries between Montaigne's Essais and Rousseau's Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, the feeling of mortality was made philosophically visible for the first time, precisely as an object of philosophical enquiry.