Franco Lo Piparo is professor emeritus of Philosophy and Theory of Language at the University of Palermo. He served as president of the Italian Society for the Philosophy of Language. He studies language as a litmus test for hidden aspects of non-linguistic phenomena. He has also traced the origins of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to university studies in linguistics and has explored Wittgenstein’s philosophy. His research has focused on the history and analysis of the concepts of symbol and sign, orality and writing, naturalness and conventionality, words and things, body and language, as well as the interplay between arithmetic calculation and the ability to think with words, within the contemporary debate on language and animal cognitivism. 

Among his works: Aristotle and Language: What Makes a Language a Language (Rome-Bari 2003, 2011, 5th ed.); Gramsci’s Two Prisons: The Fascist Prison and the Communist Labyrinth (Rome 2012, Viareggio Prize); The Enigma of the Notebook: The Hunt for Manuscripts After Gramsci’s Death (Rome 2013); Professor Gramsci and Wittgenstein: Language and Power (Rome 2014, City of Palmi Prize); On the Nature of Bodies: With the Help of Aristotle (Berlin 2019).