Ragionare oltre l’estremo: Frammenti di una discussione medievale e post-medievale

In the second half of the 13th century, many Parisian masters of the arts faced a couple of apparently absurd problems: “Can a species be preserved if there is only one individual?”; and again “Can a genus be preserved if only one of its species survives, or even only one individual of that species survives?”. It has been discussed for decades, with very subtle distinctions, in the university classrooms in Paris. What was at stake was our conceptual and cognitive structure, made up of categories, intermediate genres and lower species, and at the same time the structure of our lexicon, made up of superordinate names (hypernyms) and subordinate names (hyponyms): would this structures survive the catastrophic extinction of all animal species, except humans? And what if only Socrates were saved, of all men? This intervention tries to frame the debate in the medieval cultural framework, that was far from thinking of any animal species in terms of their possible extinction and much less of evolutionand shows a modern follow up of the debate in Thomas Hobbes: in both case a line of reasoning was carried beyond the limit of the possible, an impossible thought experiment from which to draw anyway conclusions of general and current interest.