CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT

The teaching is part of the training course of the Master's Degree in Philosophy. The training objectives are intended to provide the student with the tools for a critical understanding of the major texts of contemporary philosophy and a specific language appropriate to the topics dealt with. In the end, the student must be able to independently and critically manage a complex text of philosophy.

The course aims to provide a series of specific knowledge about contemporary philosophical thought. The student will have to acquire the skills, competences and knowledge useful for the critical comprehension and textual analysis of the major authors of contemporary philosophy, through the acquisition of a specific linguistic terminology, demonstrating to have developed communication skills and learning abilities.

General lines of the history of contemporary philosophy.

Rationale

On a daily basis, we hear of one crisis or another: the environmental and ecological crisis, the economic crisis, the national health service crisis, the mental health crisis, the housing crisis, the prison crisis, the refugee crisis, the education crisis, the constitutional crisis… Crisis is ubiquitous, and has become global. It has also become ordinary, almost normal. But how could crisis become normal without contradicting itself? If everything is a or in crisis, does the notion of crisis itself become meaningless and useless? Or should it be defined as precisely as possible, and its legitimate uses be distinguished from its illegitimate ones? This seminar will adopt a range of philosophical perspectives and methods to address those questions. It will seek to construct a rigorously philosophical concept of crisis, and define as critique the
nature and purpose of philosophy in relation to that concept. But this theoretical aspect and phase of the seminar will prepare the ground for its more practical, applied dimension, and the exploration of
concrete examples and case studies. One crisis—the ecological crisis—will be investigated systematically.

Organisation
Seminars will be divided in two parts. The first part will consist of a lecture and follow the programme detailed below. The second part will consist of a close, detailed and collective reading of specific texts
from the bibliography listed below. The latter aims to develop students’ reading and analytic skills, and ability to engage in critical dialogue with texts and one another.

Provisional Programme of Lectures:

Lecture 1: General Introduction
Part One: An Archaeology of Crisis

Lecture 2: Origins and mutations of crisis (Foucault 2003, Cooper 2004)
a. Law
b. Tragedy
c. Medicine
d. Political economy (Röpke 1950)

Lecture 3: Mutations (cont.)
a. The emergence of crisis in philosophical discourse
b. Machiavelli and the medical paradigm of crisis.
c. Hegel on contradiction
Readings: Koselleck 1988 (Part Three), 2006; excerpts from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic.

Lecture 4: Philosophical mutations (cont.)
a. In 20th century philosophy: Crisis in 20th century philosophy (Husserl 1970; Arendt 1968).
b. Heidegger 1962, 2004.

Lecture 5: Mutations (cont.)
a. In the history and philosophy of science (Kuhn 1962)
b. In medicine (Canguilhem 1991).
Part Two: Typology of Crisis:

Lecture 6: Crises of exception and the state of emergency
Readings: C. Schmitt, Political Theology, Chapters 1-2; G. Agamben, State of Exception, Chapters 1-2.

Lecture 7: Crises of exception and the state of emergency (cont.)
Readings: Rossiter 1948; Yoo 2009, 2010.

Lecture 8: Crises of contradiction in Contemporary Social and Political Thought
Readings: Marx 1863, 1973; Gramsci 1978; Habermas 1973.

Lecture 9: Crisis in Social and Political Thought (cont.)
Readings: Fraser 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015; Jaeggi 2018.

Lecture 10: Two case studies:
• The revolutionary general strike (Benjamin 1996)
• Riots in the 21st century (Clover 2019)

Lecture 11: Crises of collapse: The Ecological Crisis
Key epistemic concepts: normativity, plasticity, symbiosis

Lecture 12: Eco-critical affects
Readings: Jonas 1984 (Chapters 1, 2.4, 5); Guattari 2000.

Lecture 13: The Ecological Crisis: What can be done?
Readings: Haraway 2016 (Intro + Chapters 2-3); Moore 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017
(Chapter 5).

Lecture 14: Beyond Crisis?
Readings: Derrida 1989, 1992, 1994; Spivak 1994.

Lecture 15: General conclusion and discussion

The exam takes place in oral form. During the interview the student must demonstrate the ability to summarize and understand the fundamental themes covered in the course, an adequate philosophical language, and a good knowledge of secondary literature.

Frontal lesson wich makes use of seminar support and materials available on the University e-learning plattform.

Italian

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