Background
Corradi Fiumara, Gemma was born on January 15, 1939 in Rome.
Corradi Fiumara, Gemma was born on January 15, 1939 in Rome.
Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, 1958-1961. University of Rome, 1961-1963.
Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’.
Corradi Fiumara puts forward a philosophy of listening, offering a model of philosophy which attempts to take Socrates’ maieutics in its most faithful form: philosophy not as adversary method, but as holding the other person's thought in one’s mind so as to allow the expression of an asyet unborn thought. The stress on dialogue and in particular the function of listening leads to an alternative approach to epistemology which emphasises the role of the listener rather than the fixity of the object to be known, and the transformation of the listener in the process of listening rather than the fixity or stability of the knower. This approach is critical of more traditional epistemologies which Corradi Fiumara describes as predatory, territorial and colonizing, a proliferation of competing monologues. In her most recent work, Corradi Fiumara argues that cognition and effects cannot and should not be separated. Extending Kuhn s notion of the paradigm to symbolization, she argues that what holds us back from communication and growth may be a hypostasis of meaning embodied in symbolic paradigms that we are not aware of using and yet to which we are profoundly attached. The Symbolic Function (1992) explores the degradation of our symbolic habitat and considers the ways in which sophisticated symbolic systems or languages—such as those developed in philosophy—can be used to destroy, immobilize or prevent communication. Corradi Fiumara’s work is unusual in that it draws on both analytical and continental traditions. It belongs with an increasingly significant move towards incorporating the insights of psychoanalysis into philosophy.