Giorgio Colli

Giorgio Colli engaged in intense activity, not only in the fields of research and teaching, but also in publishing (his most internationally recognised work is the conception and realisation of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works). Colli studied archaic Greek thought extensively, arguing for the connection between the mystical and the political in the mystery and Orphic traditions, from which Presocratic speculation originated. Distancing himself from Aristotle's Metaphysics, Colli does not see the Presocratics as the stammering preparers of a future system of nature, but as imposing mystical thinkers, whose thought is in continuity with the Orphic-Eleusinian tradition. By tracing back to the roots of Presocratic "wisdom," he aims to recover its original religious and cultic matrix and background, in which the imposing figures of Dionysus and Apollo predominate.