The fourth grade students of the 2016/2017 school year wrote to us to remember Professor Marco Cerasti:
“There would be many things to say about Professor Cerasti. We believe each of his students could tell different stories, anecdotes, episodes in which the philosophical spirit that animated him not only in teaching but also in life came out. He was never a conventional teacher, and perhaps for this very reason he was among the few capable of transmitting, rather than notions, a critical sense, a desire to question oneself, to seek within oneself the same assumptions that he made us underline and explain in history textbooks. We only spent two years with him, yet his lessons each time didn’t seem to be enough, and we stopped sometimes even half an hour after the end of the hour to continue discussing with that man who seemed to be the direct descendant of a strange cross between Socrates and Marx. There are not many teachers who, having forgotten that they have a seventh period lesson on a Monday, would be called by their students to get them back to class. We remember that at the end of the fourth year of high school he made us study Kant very briefly, ‘because next year you will have a new professor and you will have to study Hegel. And to understand Hegel you need Kant; so forgive me, but I had to explain this to you in a more traditional way.’ Then, asked about other typical points of the fourth grade program that we had not covered: ‘Descartes? Ninth. Descartes I don’t do it anyway. Because I don’t like him, I don’t like him… he’s boring. Spinoza? Oh, damn it. I forgot Spinoza. I like that. I wanted to do it but damn; here’s what I forgot! We had to do Spinoza!’. Here, somehow, even after 5, 6 years after finishing high school, today we realize that we have never really abandoned the hope of a last lesson on Spinoza, of a last seventh hour on Monday; and if we have remembered him with these somewhat joking anecdotes, it is only to exorcise this great and strange lack that we now feel. Thank you, professor.”
