Oltre Severino : priorità ontologica dell'ombra e senso dell'essere in Platone e Heidegger

The opposition between light and shadow passes through the history of occidental philosophy: it is the everlasting horizon where the possibility of a “sense” is to be decided. In the recent Italian thought, special focus was given to this topic by Emanuele Severino, who tacitly proposed a metaphorical reading, seeing it as a symbol of a more radical opposition between being and not-being. This article shall problematize this metaphorical character. Our hope is that of a possible theoretic profit, thanks to a certainly interested and nevertheless rigorous hermeneutic of the Platonic and Heideggerian works, which may allow to breach Severino’s original structure. The ontological priority of shadow opens the wider horizon of transcendence, which may be an antidote to the difficulties which nihilism faces in its attempt to answer the ethical questions and to their utter elimination in Severino’s eternalism.