“In speculo columbe”: la colombaia di Platone e il colombario di Nietzsche. Su metafora, cognizione e riflessione

The essay addresses the issue of metaphor by drawing on Nelson Goodman’s work and on the debate concerning metaphorical meaning between Donald Davidson and Max Black. It thus establishes a distinction between cognitively weak metaphors and cognitively strong metaphors. On this basis, the paper examines the tension between metaphor and category through the image of the dovecote in Plato’s Theaetetus and that of the colombarium in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. The discussion then turns to the notion of absolute metaphor as developed between Kant and Blumenberg, taking inspiration from a stanza drawn from Hildegard von Bingen’s Sequentia de Sancto Dysibodo.