ABSTRACT
Gesturing philosophers engaged in argument are portrayed in Raphael’s painting known as The School of Athens: Plato pointing his index finger in the direction of the heavenly spheres, and Aristotle moving his hand down toward the natural grounding of things. Of course these gestures are pictorially suggestive of what would be the main trajectories of our nascent western philosophy-ultimately idealism and realism. And yet these bodily attitudes are only an ostensive indication of our main philosophical orientations: they could be interpreted, in fact, as a presentation of our coexistence with a pre-philosophical life, with the bodily ‘unconscious’ movements which concur to structure and shape intellectual developments.
