Form and Event

Abstract

Italian philologist and philosopher Carlo Diano’s Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World is a work of great importance not only for classical studies of Ancient Greece, but also for contemporary continental philosophy. Form and Event has been translated into a variety of languages and its translation now into English makes available this seminal work to a larger audience. In Form and Event Diano updates phenomenologically these two classical categories across a number of masterful readings of Aristotle, the Stoics, and particularly Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventful form.” On Diano’s read, eventual forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.