Long ago the natural sciences achieved a universal language and a global network of information exchange, so that a new finding in astronomy, or chemistry, or biology is almost immediately noted, evaluated, and replicated in laboratories the world over. By contrast in the social sciences, U.S. scholars are nowadays generally unaware of what their colleagues in other nations are doing. Because anthropology, sociology and psychology rely heavily on language and cultural context for describing and explaining their findings, it is often difficult to understand the significance of foreign scholarship, even on those rare occasions when it appears in English translation.

There are, of course, exceptions: In the past half century or so, the works of Levy-Strauss, Piaget, Vigotsky, and a few others have had a pervasive influence on American social science. But our assimilation of foreign thought has been quite selective: Only those scholars tend to be translated whose work is already congenial to an American readership. This is unfortunate, because one could argue that in the domain of the Geistenwissenschaften a multivocal, multicultural perspective advances knowledge more effectively than the homogeneous, hegemonic approach of the natural sciences. Regional accents might be jarring in mathematics, but in psychology they often greatly enrich our understanding of human experience by providing unusual perspectives and new possibilities.

Paolo Inghilleri provides one such enriching voice. Inghilleri, like his colleagues who were trained by Professor Fusto Massimini at the University of Milan, had his secondary schooling in the Liceo Classico, with its demanding curriculum heavy on ancient Greek, Latin and philosophy.