Alessandro Ferrara

The author proposes a key of interpretation of the post — modern age not as a mere cultural attitude but as an effective philosophical horizon of our time. Two considerations are needed in order to define it: the proclaimed impossibility of a one-way description of reality, and the conviction of the existence of a plurality of conceptual schemes which can not be absolutely reduced one to the other. Therefore postmodernism severely limits the possibility of analysing notions such as liberty, justice and good, which are laden with universalism. After indicating the different possible solutions, the author presents his personal thesis of reflective authenticity: from the kantian notion of reflective judgement, the author traces in authenticity (intended not in a simple psychological or existential sense) the quality of "being measure for one-selves" or self-congruence typical of arts’ masterpieces. By disengaging this notion from its original aesthetic ambit it is possible, in Ferrara’s opinion, to refer to a pluralistic or exemplar universalism, applicable to ethics as to law, to the political judgement as to the theoretical one, completely different from that generic universalism which is on the contrary based on trans-contextual principles, typical of the modern age.

In this essay the author shows what human beings share in a pluralistic society: on one side the great principles of speculative reason and, on the other side and above all, the great principles of practical reason (synteresis). In order to actualise these ancient suggestions the author underlines, the theme of mutual recognition, which passes through the best part of ethical and political contemporary thought. Within the notion of mutual recognition, terms like good, justice, freedom acquire their right and original meaning. Good what permits the flowering of my life; good is, therefore, to love myself; but I can love myself only by loving others as the ones who can make such flowering possible. Justice is to give everyone what he deserves. But what everyone deserves is to be recognised as a (transcendental) subjectivity. Freedom does not mean unconditioned arbitrary, but freedom to do good things. Since the first objective good, historically speaking, is the other’s-being-there for me, freedom means, another time, freedom of recognising others as a good for me. Therefore doing, at the same time and in a certain order, my good through the other’s good and the other’s good through mine. Political good, if we remain at a molecular level.

Francesco Botturi

Pluralism and its inner potential conflictuality is the main problem of political thought in the modern world, as the recent querelle between liberals and communitarians has significantly demonstrated. A different perspective emerges from the careful consideration of social interaction. The political body arises, when the pursuing of social communication itself is set as a common end - that is, when social communication institutes a permanent space of communication. Thus, a re-consideration of politics is possible through a re-thinking of human relationships. This opens the path to the possibility of a significative convergence towards the political aristotelism of the origins and with its notion of "natural sociality" of mankind: a tradition which indicates in the participation to the "useful" (a category which implies the virtue of justice) the proper ground for politics.

Francesco Botturi

The meaning of liberty cannot be simply reduced to other traditional categories, such as "capability of choice" or "free will". Human liberty is rather the dialectic, organic unity of all the functions of human acting, so that "freedom" is declined in a triple sense. First, and basically, freedom is self-motivation, that is, decision and choice; secondarily, it is also self-realization or liberation, and, finally, it is the relation to the liberty of the other. Only this plurality of meanings gives reason of the anthropologic significance of liberty as a whole, including its necessary inferences: history, labour and gratuitousness of liberty.

Lucio Pinkus

The essay deals with the necessity of solidarity in the process of the building of the self-identity. Starting from some phaenomenological observations over our contemporary society, we can see, on one hand, that some epochal processes tend to bound the right to a subjective identity of our own, whether not to remove it; on the other, the need for a "recognition" by the others is growing stronger in a still individualistic-looking world. In the author's assessment, our task nowadays is to revisit the "classic" notion of identity, and psychology cannot count itself out of this duty. When approaching the notion of identity, we'd better off leaving aside general and abstract interpretations referred to an even more abstract and universal "human nature": we'd better focusing on a re-definition of the spheres of "private" and "public", and of their reciprocal relation. Self-identity should not be regarded as a possession of the self, with solidarity as its noble corollary, but they both should be seen as the necessary poles of a human existence entirely built around them, and thus capable of inter-communicate with the others. Only inter-communication can give a shared meaning of life, and can act as catalyst for all psychical and psycho-social processes.

Francesco Totaro

Nel saggio la domanda critica di fondo è: quale solidarietà. In risposta, viene messa a fuoco la duplice valenza semantica della solidarietà, descrittiva e valutativo-prescrittiva. Viene alla fine proposta un’etica ontologica della solidarietà, usando di una formulazione di tipo kantiano, secondo una triplice articolazione: a) sul fondamento dell’essere comune considera sempre l’essere altrui come vorresti fosse considerato il tuo proprio essere; b) sul fondamento dell’essere comune, per quanto già manifesto, tratta l’essere altrui come vorresti venga trattato il tuo proprio essere; c) sul fondamento dell’essere comune, per quanto non ancora manifesto, incrementa l’essere altrui come vorresti sia incrementato il tuo proprio essere.

Italo De Sandre

In this paper the author maintains that solidarity is the ethical fundament or, in a wider sense, it is the social and cultural basis of every society. Solidarity provides with meaning and justification personal and functional relationships, simple or more complex as they may be. Solidarity is originated (and continuously re–originated)on the basis of three different dynamic aspects: - common recognition, through which a collectivity identifies with an "us" both rationally and emotionally perceived, differentiated from the "others"; - reciprocity, which is obtained thanks to the consolidated confidence and trust between the members of a society and thanks also to the open attitude towards social relationships; responsibility, which characterises the concrete duty we have consciously taken towards (and inside) society. At last the author argues that solidarity can be culturally expressed by means of generalised symbolic codes (truth, power, money, love and friendship, art, religion and so on); these codes constitute the cultural structures which signify and rule expectations, social roles, and the representations we have of things, persons and values. These symbolic codes, if correctly declined, are "foundations of solidarity".

Pierangelo Sequeri

In this essay the author maintains that the brelationship with the ideality of being is characterised by the well- promising convergence of truth’s revelation with justice’s assurance. The being’s truth is attested by the stability of good. Being is being comme il faut, as it must be in order to be good, as it must be in order to be fine. From this point of view, post-modern conscience is criticised. The author argues that modern conscience is something different both from the figures of illuministic subjectivity, and from the figures moulded by historical conscience: it is not diachronic in relationship with the projectual, constructive, emancipatory orientation of freedom, but it is not synchronic either, as on the contrary structuralism (functionalism, constructivism, contractualism) wrongly maintain because of its need of coherence. We could define it chronic: linked to symbolic values of temporal flood and distrustful of any stability of being in its different ties (as truth and as justice). Distrustful, because it has separated being from its connections. In this way the contemporary drift of European secularisation has generated a new figure: that of an agnosticism interested in religion and uninterested in faith. The author gives an accurate analysis of this type of agnosticism by treating it as a figure of post-modern secularity.

Carlo Chiurlo

This work deals with the basic notions of "sovereignty" (souverainetè) and "waste" (dépense) in the thought of Georges Bataille. Sovereignty and waste can be easily drawn near the more classical notions of liberty and justice, but of course they are revisited by Bataille only in order to be transgressively distorted. Thus - on the base of a complete refusal of every ontology deliberately drawn to the point of a no-turning back absolute contradiction -, liberty becomes the power to give both birth and destruction arbitrarily exercised by the free will of an absolutely free individual. Justice, or better still equality, becomes the reversal of the bourgeois ideal of a never-ending storing up of richness: richness must be senselessly wasted, so that the sacred social order of the potlac can be re-created. The essay ends showing how these basic notions of Bataille's thought are, at last, deeply self-contradictory, his ideals impossible and, finally, anti-human.

Giovanni Catapano

Massimo Cacciari is one of the sharpest theorists of that cultural crisis from which Postmodernism is originated. Throughout the various forms that the twentieth-century thought has taken he recognises the fundamental idea that reality is composed by antinomies. No dialectical "synthesis" can overcome them. From a moral and political point of view, this means that different subjects can live together only if they maintain their difference and their opposition.  Harmony with the others cannot be imposed from above. Harmony lies in the opposition itself and therefore needs difference. Cacciari is certainly right in claiming the value of difference, although this should not imply the reality of contradiction, which is impossible both from a logical and from an ontological point of view.

Luca Grion

The philosophical meditation by Gianni Vattimo emerges as a flat refusal of every expression of violence. For this reason we can say it dips its roots on ethics. The blame of metaphysical knowledge and of demonstrative logic rise from this ethical need. This kind of thought is guilty of obstruct the intersubjective dialogue and the meeting between different cultures.

As a reason for his staying between existential meditation and taking leave from metaphysical tradition, Vattimo’s work appears as the result of Nietzsche’s teaching and Heidegger’s suggestions.

But does Vattimo ménage to hang on to his project? Can the preacher of peace be guilty of violence? This article will tray to make clear about this questions, moving between an accurate reading of Vattimo’s works and a critique of his results.

The "Symposium", a collection of various essays, opens a debate on Carlo Galli's work "Spazi Politici". In his intervention Edoardo Greblo suggests that Europe could lay the institutional basis for a sort of "political closing", capable of limiting the spatial dynamics of globalisation. In this same sense Renato Cristin underlines the need for a constitutional paper, intended as a departure point from which all Europeans could start off in order to regain their identity, nowadays endangered by external factors, both economical and cultural. Pierpaolo Marrone resumes Galli's idea of "deconstructing" whatever is presented in front of us by using the imperative power of naturality, i. e. a supposed unitary sense of globalisation and technique. In his "Considerations" Carlo Galli maintains that on one hand the present age of globalisation represents the closing of the age of the political universals of modernity, and on the other hand it imposes the exigency of "closing" the space which globalisation has made amorphous, in order to find non-residual spaces where one can be free to valorise mobility as the common condition of all mankind.

Maurizio Salvi

In 1996 the birth of ‘Dolly’, the first mammal cloned, has opened discussions among biologists and the public about the desirability of such a technology (Terragni 1999, Dijck 1998). This is surprising when we think that cloning was not a new technology. The first experiments of nuclear transfer with amphibians (Rana pipiens and Xenoplus laevis) were performed in the United States and Britain during 1950s (Gordon & Colman 2000:743-746). Nuclear transfer experiments were performed in amphibians in the 1960s, in mice in the 1970s, in sheep in the 1980s, and in monkeys in the 1990s. In this paper I deal with ethical issues related to human reproductive cloning. I will claim that we have no reason to oppose human reproductive cloning a priori.

Cristiano Mautarelli

In this paper I discuss Davide Sparti’s book Wittgenstein politico and I examine the possibility to read Wittgenstein’s later works from an ethical and political point of view. I defend the following thesis: we can understand the political interest of Wittgenstein’s philosophy only if we analyse its ethical value.

I pay attention especially to the main themes presented in Sparti’s book, and I sketch an analysis of the relationship between Philosophische Untersuchungen’s ethical meaning and the ethical meaning of the whole wittgensteinian approach to philosophy. Moreover, I argue against the tendency currently shown by philosophy of politics to judge Wittgenstein’s thought a conservative one.