RICERCA ITALIANA     

Life and forms of culture in the Modern and the Contemporary Ages

Università degli Studi di Catania

Abstract

The project aims to inquiry about the multifaceted cultural forms originated during the Modern and the Contemporary Age, especially pointing out the role of philosophy as a subject able to analyse critically heterogeneous cultural expressions as well as to inquiry about the different representations of reality and society they imply. Particular importance will be given to the phenomenon of disciplinary specialization, which started up during the Modern Age, and to the need for a reunification of the consequently dissected cultural context, which can also be understood as an element of national identity. Therefore, we will examine cultural contributions from heterogeneous cultural fields, such as religion, science, history, arts and so on, keeping in mind that philosophical inquiry can not exist in isolation and rather it needs disciplinary contamination in order to be effective. Such a need for “hybridization” as well as for the elimination of a too rigid disciplinary specialization requires the construction of local research units including thinkers able to understand critically the relations between diverse scientific fields, since only through a confrontation between different expertises and experiences it is possible to obtain a far-reaching picture of the social, political and cultural reality of the Modern and Contemporary Age.
In order to fulfil such an aim, we propose to inquiry about models of rationality and social organizations put forward by the western >>>

Principal Investigator

Francesco Coniglione Università degli Studi di CATANIA

Research Objectives

The project aims to act in conformity to the 2000 Lisbon Conference of the EU which expressed the hope to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy able to realize an increase in sustainable development, better employment and a better social cohesion by 2010”. In order to make this possible the cultural world must contribute. We think our project qualifies as able to promote a social development toward a knowledge-based society. We believe this is the proper objective for the cultural world if it aims to allow for a equal society able to fight against social and economic inequality. Globalization, in fact, appears two-faced: on one hand, we assist at a shortening of temporal and spatial distances in terms of communication and contacts between cultures - in this respect we can say that Marshall McLuhan’s definition, the “global village”, born in the sixties, is nowadays closer to the truth; on the other hand, Globalization allow for less pacific facets of its effects since it caused an increase in inequality as well as an economic and political submission involving the peripheries of the capitalistic economy. The two-faced character of Globalization causes a tension originating in conflicts and an increasing diplomatic uncertainty. The optimistic prediction of Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), the idea that the fall of the CCCP and the consequent ending of the Cold War would have determined “the end of history” with the >>>

First Results

Our research aims to enhance the development of knowledge in the Italian and European scientific fields that concerns it. The expected impacts can be divided into two stages: in the first stage we expect a throughout analysis of the forms of culture that contribute in defining an Italian national identity in accordance to its European context. In this respect we can assume as a methodological paradigm of philosophical inquiry Cassirer’s La filosofia delle forme simboliche. There Cassirer aimed to analyse the theoretical premises at the ground of different cultures pointing out the peculiarity of each form of culture in order to resist a reductionist propensity at highlighting a common form of knowledge to which all the others can be reduced. Following these lines of thought the researches of the individual units compounding the project calls upon different scientific fields grasping the whole history of modern and contemporary ideas such as ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science and the dialogue between cultures. At this stage each unit of research is autonomous in its scientific organization concerning the epistemological foundation of each of the scientific fields above mentioned.
In the second stage we intend to encourage the interaction between units based on the discussion of research results obtained in the first part of the project. Our leading assumption will be the acknowledgment of the historicity of human reason. A consequence of this >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

In the contemporary literature there are several works showing a global perspective pointing out an integrated outlook of the issues addressed by the project. Other works show a specialist dimension which analyses scientifically the topics addressed.
As far as the first group of works is concerned, many of them show a wide perspective. In this respect we have to consider the bibliography of Eric Hobsbawm’s The age of extreme, The short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (1994), which identifies the history of the 20th Century with the history of the contrast between factions, pointing out that the falling of the socialist faction and the advent of the single-pole order meant the coming of a new era associated with partially new issues. So, for instance, many leading scholars have spoken of the Contemporary Age as a period marked by the end of representative democracy and the advent of a new form of governance based on the ever-increasing preponderance of technology such that we refer to this form of management of the existing using the term “technocracy” (see the interview of Antonio Gnoli to Luciano Canfora on Repubblica the 18th of September 2007 in order to get a significant analysis of this issue; see also Canfora’s La democrazia. Storia di un’ideologia, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2004 and Critica della retorica democratica, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2002).
Concerning specific European cultural traditions there is a huge literature that would be impossible to mention here fully >>>