A philosopher in Italy (not in Genoa) called these search materials to my attention, referring to the outcome of the search as an "academic scandal." (My thanks to this philosopher for help translating the materials). Briefly, the Department of Philosophy at Genoa advertised a position in history of philosophy. There were 32 applicants, including two philosophers (with permanent academic posts outside Italy) who had published major scholarly monographs with Cambridge University Press (on Kant) and Oxford University Press (on Nietzsche); only one of these was even chosen as a finalist! But he too was passed over in favor of a person working as a support teacher in a high school in Genoa, who had published a book on Wittgenstein with an Italian press (I confess I've never heard of the press, and I'm told it is not a major press), but who had spent their entire career at Genoa (i.e., all their degrees and teaching). (As an aside, I know the work of one of the finalists well--an Italian now teaching in Portugal, previously in Germany--who is quite clearly the preeminent philosophical Nietzsche scholar in Europe, and one of the leading scholars internationally. If he'd lost to the Kant scholar, whose work I do not know, this would at least have been explicable.)
This really is an embarrassment for the University of Genoa. (Ironically, Genoa has probably the best legal philosophy group in Italy, based in the law faculty, and with a high degree of international visibility.)
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