Roberto Farneti
Of Humans and Other Portentous Beings: On Primo Levi's Storie naturali
Alia, quae ex omni parte transfigurantur in alienae creationis portentum, ut ex muliere vitulum dicit historia generatum.1
—
ISIDORUS HISPALENSIS
, Etymologiae
Many will recall Quine's endeavors to accommodate in a workable ontology things whose existence is deemed disputable. It all depends, so the argument goes, on the kind of commitments people make when they claim that something "is." In Quine's article a character named Wyman plays the role of the ideal believer in a universe that grants existence to chimeras and other imaginary items.2 Wyman's overpopulated universe resembles, in my view, the universe featured by Primo Levi in a collection of short stories published in 1966. Here, Levi seemed to commit himself to recognizing as entities a variety of things to which a standard ontology only hesitatingly would accord existence.
1. "Others, which in each and every part are transfigured in portentous beings, alien to creation, as when history says that a veal was generated by a woman" (Isidorus Hispalensis, Etymologiae [Oxford, 1911], 11.3.9). Additionally, Isidore of Seville states that a portent (portentum) is not what is against nature but rather what is against known nature (nota natura) (ibid., 11.3.4).
2. See Willard Quine, "On What There Is," From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 1–19.
ROBERTO FARNETI is research associate (cultore della materia) in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Il canone moderno: Filosofia politica e genealogia (2002) and is currently completing a book manuscript, in English, on contemporary challenges to the classical understanding of normativity.
