Double appointment in Udine with Massimo Cacciari on Tuesday 23rd and Wednesday 24th April, organized by the Department of Humanistic Studies and Cultural Heritage of the Friulian University.
In the first appointment, open to the public, scheduled for 5.30 pm in the Marzio Strassoldo room of the Grandi Aule Tomadini, Professor Cacciari will hold a lesson dedicated to Philosophy today, while the following day at 9.30 am in Room T9 of Palazzo Garzolini di Toppo Wassermann in via Gemona 92, in a seminar that will be reserved for students, will talk about Philosophy, Technology and Artificial Intelligence.
A volume by Massimo Cacciari has recently been published by Adelphi which, right from the title, appears somewhat against the grain, Concrete Metaphysics, since metaphysics (from half age physika’ i.e. Aristotle’s books that followed those on Physics), as it has been understood for centuries, i.e. the search for foundations that went beyond or beyond the sensitive experiential data and rather founded its subsistence, had almost disappeared from contemporary philosophical horizon, relegated at most to the study of classical thought.
Professor Cacciari, metaphysics, as a science, does not enjoy great esteem in current philosophical discourse, mostly associated with something esoteric, mystical, close to faith. Why did this happen?
«There has been a sort of fragmentation of knowledge, of specialization of knowledge. The different philosophies that have emerged over the last century. And then it must be said that, who knows why, metaphysics is identified with a speculation on something abstract, which concerns some world beyond ours. Contemporary philosophy is essentially the philosophy of immanence.”
So metaphysics as the study of the transcendent?
“No. At least that’s how I see it. Metaphysics means a study aimed at the thing as such, at being. Essente is a participle, therefore metaphysics addresses the question of the participation of being in the whole. Metaphysics means taking care of what remains that cannot be calculated but always in relation to the thing as such, looking at what is not properly observable or experienceable in beings. Therefore nothing transcendent, but something that sees the being in its integrity. Metaphysics constitutes the necessary fulfillment of theoretical physics, saving it from the mere description of its individual areas. No discipline is self-sufficient, no discipline in its singularity can account for everything.”
Hence the task of philosophy today?
«Certainly, because philosophy means questioning everything, it is a critical disposition that asks everyone to explain the meaning of their doing and operating. If this radically anti-dogmatic attitude disappears, it is clear that the very soul of our philosophy disappears, the ability to criticize the scientific order of knowledge, but also the political order in which we live, disappears.”
What then should be the relationship between philosophy and science?
«It must be said that both of these two dimensions tend to the study of beings, because if this were not the case we would have a philosophy that would deal only with ethical things and a specialized science, oriented only to analyzing individual dimensions of beings, unrelated to the whole which instead they belong. An integrity that we do not see, but that philosophy and metaphysics help us to recognize. Hence the concreteness of metaphysics, which helps us look at what is beyond, at the beyond inherent in everything, in every phenomenon, in every determination; and then it must be up to scientific progress. In particular, metaphysics will have to question itself on the difference between natural and artificial which is at the center of all sciences, and of all technology, not only with regard to artificial intelligence, but also with regard to genetic manipulation; that is, we seem to have the means to build a new nature.”
But are the thinking machine and intervention in gene editing really new in nature?
«Concrete metaphysics means understanding where we are going, the meaning of this process and establishing what continues to differentiate my natural being from that of the machine».
Tags: Interview Massimo Cacciari book bridge metaphysics science
