Simona Forti is an Italian philosopher and academic, whose main interests are in political philosophy and contemporary ethics. She was born in Modena in 1958. She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in 1983. In the following years she attended the Phd courses in political theory at the Turin University as well as the Phd courses in political philosophy at The New School in New York. She received her PhD in History of Political Thought from Turin University in 1989. In 2004 she was appointed Full Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the University of Eastern Piedmont. In 2020, she was appointed Full Professor of Political Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, in Pisa, Italy. She is one of the founding members of FINO”, a PhD Program in Philosophy coordinated by the Northwestern Italian University Consortium, and the standing president of Bios, an international and interdisciplinary research center on biopolitics and bioethics based at the University of Piemonte Orientale.
Research interests
Simona Forti is widely recognized in Italy and aboard for her far-reaching studies on Hannah Arendt’s thought and the philosophical idea of Totalitarianism. In recent years she has given important contributions to the debate on [biopolitics] launched by Michel Foucault, by focusing on Nazi biopolitics of the souls and democratic biopolitics of the bodies. In her last volume, "New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today," translated into English and published by Stanford University Press in 2015, she deals with the contemporary reshaping of the notion of Evil. In the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Brad Evans (University of Bath) began his review of the book by stating, "Simona Forti's book is a sophisticated and theoretically rich text, which demands wide readership." Forti offers a new and inspiring genealogy of the relationship between evil and power, contending that evil must be explored in tandem with the passive attitude towards rule-following, the need for normalcy and recognition, the desire to stay alive at all costs, and the desire for obedience nurtured by our contemporary mass democracies.
From 2003 to 2011 Simona Forti was elected as member of the jury for “Der Hannah-Arendt Preis für politischen Denken” at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen and Berlin. From 2004 to 2007 she served as the Italian member of the Coordinating “International Committee of the European Science Foundation Network Activity on "The Politics and History of European Democratization" (PHED) for the European Science Foundation.
She has held visiting appointments at many European and American universities. In 2016-2017 as well as in 2011-2012, held lessons and seminars at The New School for Social Research in New York, an institution which has actively contributed to spread the European philosophical tradition known as Continental philosophy in the US. Moreover, during the spring semester 2013–14 she has been awarded a “Fulbright Distinguished Chair” at Northwestern University, (Evanston, Il).
Selected works
The New Demons. Rethinking evil and power today, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2015, reviewed by A. Cavarero, Political Theory, XLV, 2017, n. 3, pp. 430–444: https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Ffull%2F10.1177%2F0090591716640470&e=5f74b327&h=2857395f&f=n;
Totalitarianism. Historical Regime or Bio-Power Intimate Vocation? , Public Seminar at The New School for Social Research: http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/02/totalitarianism/#.WS6YFBMT6u5;
Philosophy and Nazism, conference at the London School of Economics: https://urlsand.esvalabs.com/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lse.ac.uk%2Fwebsite-archive%2FnewsAndMedia%2FvideoAndAudio%2Fchannels%2FpublicLecturesAndEvents%2Fplayer.aspx%3Fid%3D3793&e=5f74b327&h=95604fda&f=n;
"The Soul as Site of Dissidence", in F. Tava and D. Meacham (eds), Thinking After Europe. Jan Patocka and Politics, Washington, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016;
Totalitarismo, Filosofia y Biopolitica, Estudios Publicos, 2016, n. 142, pp. 129–150;
H. Arendt, Karl Marx e la tradizione del pensiero politico occidentale, ed, by S. Forti, Milano, Cortina, 2016;
"Hannah Arendt lettrice di Karl Marx", in H. Arendt, Karl Marx e la tradizione del pensiero politico occidentale''', Milano, Cortina, 2016;Corpi (bio)-politicamente corretti, in L. Bazzicalupo e S. Vaccaro (eds.), Vita, politica, contingenza, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2016;Vecchi e nuovi romantici, Iride", XXVIII, 2015, n.1;
H. Arendt, Socrate, ed. by I. Possenti, with essays by S. Forti and A. Cavarero, Milano, Cortina, 2015;