On Filters And Philters.

Facets Advanced Seminar In Philosophy Of Communication

The seminar, intertwined with the activities of the ERC FACETS research group, aims to explore the dialectic between two terms and as many semantic fields, which appear in Italian with the same name, “filtro” but which, homophones, receive two different names in English, “philter” and “filter”.

A single sound actually conceals a radical difference between the two lemmas and their related concepts, confirmed by their etymology: a “philter” is a magic potion, a bewitching concoction, a prodigious mash; in fact, it derives from the Greek verb “philéo”, “I love” and from the same etymological root as “philosophy”; philters have been used, in effect, trying to exert a magical effect on the will of others, often wanting to induce them to perform actions contrary to their true will. The philter par excellence, then, is the “love potion”, the concoction that prompts the other to fall in love and that appears in long and complex mythological, literary, iconographic, and other traditions. “Filter”, on the other hand, which in Italian is always called “filtro”, has the same etymology as “felt” and indicates, instead, that which makes an obstacle to direct contact between two entities or objects, as if it were a felt precisely, or a veil, or any other device that acts like a membrane, a gap, a filter indeed.

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