Religious Studies

What is it like to be an earthly, worldly, “secular” creature? Is it a blessing or is it a curse? During the last two centuries, this question has generally been answered with an appeal to disengagedness and objectivity, that is, to an indisputable “scientific” representation of the whole of “reality.”  The world then seems to serve as a justification, through the “facts of the matter,” of the superiority of optimism or pessimism. On the contrary, I want in this essay to show that, in order to argue convincingly about our basic attitudes towards the world and the reasons pro or con for them (if we have any reasons at all), we do not have to insist on disinterest; we need, rather, to move toward primary and apparently objectless emotions, of the kind that are called Stimmungen in German. In other words, we need an epistemology of basic existential moods.
In particular, I examine, out of many possible, one basic attitude toward world – the readiness to be surprised or amazed by things or events – on the hypothesis that one of the preconditions for feeling at home in the world has to be sought exactly here.

Il tema di questo libro (pubblicato nel 2007) è Charles Darwin e il significato filosofico della sua opera. Sebbene sia passato pressoché inosservato nel dibattito infuocato innescato dal duecentesimo anniversario della nascita di Darwin (1809), occupa un posto speciale nella mia produzione scientifica. Ci si può fare un'idea del mio sforzo di comprendere la rilevanza filosofica della rivoluzione darwiniana leggendo l'introduzione e il capitolo finale del libro, anche se il testo è stato concepito, in sintonia con lo spirito weltanschauunlich della grande narrazione evoluzionistica, come un unico lungo ragionamento che partendo dalla nascita dell'antropologia filosofica nella prima modernità giunge a un'interpetazione pluralistica dell'odierno senso comune naturalistico. Qualsiasi commento o feedback è benvenuto anche dopo tutti questi anni.

This is a book on Charles Darwin (published in 2007) and the philosophical significance of his oeuvre. Although it ended up being virtually ignored in the huge debate about evolutionary theory triggered by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday, it occupies a special place in my scientific output. You can get an idea of my effort of making philosophical sense of the Darwinian Revolution from reading the Introduction and the last chapter. But the book was designed as one long argument that begins with the rise of philosophical anthropology in the sixteenth century and leads to a pluralistic interpretation of today's naturalistic common sense. Any sort of feed-back is welcome even after all these years.

The paper re-examines Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” and defends its usefulness. One of the main challenges facing people who are summoned to judge cases of extreme evil is how to find the right distance from the events. How much disengagement is permitted? How much identification? How much severity? How much indulgence? According to Arendt’s solution, the right distance cannot be established a priori. It is the result of our efforts to understand historical events and to build a humanly significant world where the capacity to act and judge can be exercised. Thus, banality of evil is not synonymous with a global (and disjunctive) theory of evil. It may rather be seen as a handy catchphrase that encourages a personal assumption of re-sponsibility: a responsibility for self. After all, for Arendt, Eichmann’s main personal trait (and fault) was precisely his lack of a respondent self.

Arendt's view is perfectly summarized by the following lines from Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of the Man Arturo Ui", that Arendt loved to quote: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot and the extent of his enterprises does not make him a great man. If the ruling classes permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history. That is, the fact that he becomes a great crook, and that what he does has great consequences does not add to his stature… One may say that tragedy deals with the sufferings of mankind in a less serious way than comedy”.

Why is the concept of responsibility so important in contemporary moral discourse? In the essay, responsibility's significance is put into a wider historical horizon and its foundational claim is tied with the issue of personal identity. If responsibility is all-pervading, does it make sense to speak of a responsibility for self?

Il rapporto tra Darwin e la filosofia è tutt"altro che scontato, al punto che ci si potrebbe persino chiedere che cos"abbia mai a che fare Darwin con la filosofia. Esiste una risposta celebre a questo interrogativo, offerta nel suo stile al contempo lapidario ed enigmatico da Ludwig Wittgenstein nel Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921): "la teoria darwiniana ha da fare con la filosofia non più che qualsiasi altra ipotesi della scienza naturale", 1 cioè poco o nulla, sembra di capire. Una decina d"anni prima, un altro importante filosofo del Novecento, John Dewey, aveva però espresso un parere opposto in cui celebrava l"influenza di Darwin sulla filosofia parlando, a proposito dell"Origine delle specie, di una epocale "rivolta intellettuale" e di "una nuova temperie spirituale". 2 Chi ha ragione tra i due?

"The operationalization of the modern idea of deep time is one of the most important and, at the same time, most neglected aspects of the Darwinian intellectual revolution. The “dark abyss of time” (Buffon) becomes in Darwin the background of a natural story that proceeds at an immensly slow pace and whose main characters are macro-individuals with a mysterious nature: species.
But to what extent is it possible and legitimate to tell such a story? Is there not a risk of losing sight of the vastness of deep time when the irriducibly human stance of storytelling is taken? The legitimacy and usefulness of evolutionary tales will be argued for in the paper, but at the same time I will also point out the inherent risks, which grow out of their status of quasi-narratives. The embeddedment of human history in the natural history is fruitful and, in many regards, inescapable, but it can lead to a sort of neonaturalistic mythology if it is not submitted to a critical evaluation that takes into account the narrative primacy of the present in any form of human storytelling.
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There lies a feeling of reprisal behind the choice to argue for the legitimacy of a philosophical investigation on our puzzling life form. It arises from the desire to defend the worth of the traditional philosophical aspiration to reach a mildly synoptic view on reality, even in the time of the triumph of natural science’s analytic attitude. But how far this aspiration may be warranted in light of the contemporary philosophical debate? In my paper, I will try to argue in favour of a wide-ranging reflection on the sense of human experience by making use of theoretical tools developed by a number of analytic and post-analytic contemporary philosophers (Charles Taylor and John McDowell among others).

È sorprendente, ma non inspiegabile, che l'epoca del trionfo della democrazia venga da molti interpretata e descritta anche come l'epoca del suo tramonto. Proprio quando è diventato quasi impossibile non essere o non definirsi democratici, monta infatti l'insoddisfazione per lo stato e la salute delle democrazie contemporanee, soprattutto tra gli intellettuali e presso quello che è ormai consuetudine chiamare il ceto medio riflessivo, ma che con un'espressione divenuta ormai quasi impronunciabile verrebbe voglia di definire l'opinione pubblica illuminata 1 .

How do we have to understand historical transitions? Are they real or not? What philosophers can add to historians' understanding of historical change?
Taking cue from Taylor's writings, I outline here a realist framework for accounting for long-term transitions.