Azimuth 1/2013 | The Domain of the Human. Anthropological Frontiers in Modern and Contemporary Thought

Edited by Simone Guidi, Antonio Lucci
ISBN: 9788863725445

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The current issue looks into the concept of Man and in particular at the anthropological domain that this notion has represented at different times in the history of modern and contemporary western thought. It does this, however, by focusing on its cut-off points, where questions have revealed a fundamental instability at the root of the very concept of “human’’, thus attempting to show that every “theory of human nature’’ must by its very nature look beyond human nature as it identifies and ‘brings out’ to the point of alienation the inner grammar and constitutive logic of that combination of forces commonly known as ‘Man’. In mapping out a sketch of the elements that make up the setting for this problem, we have set out to give this collection the structure of a round trip. As our starting point for this selection we have taken the mechanistic and naturalistic revolution in the theory of human nature which, starting from Descartes in the heyday of the modern era, for the first time assigns to physiological investigation autonomous prerogatives in defining the human, bringing in a wide range of anthropological paradoxes concerning the dividing lines between Man, machine and animal. These paradoxes were to push philosophical reflection itself, with Kant, towards the new shores of a moral and pragmatic theory of human nature which was to be characteristic of the whole second part of the modern era and which is richly dealt with in this volume. The same paradoxes had to be faced again with the arrival of Darwinian evolutionary theory, when they had to be integrated with the problems that had arisen in the moral and idealistic thinking of the early 19th century. So by closing with the concept of the “post-human’’, the return of this selection to its starting point perhaps brings us to the point of connection between the two poles around which philosophical reflection on human nature has revolved – nature and spirit – and the culmination of a duality that seems to us to identify and delineate the domain of the human that western thought has been mapping out from the early 17th century until today. Hoping you enjoy the read, we invite you to look forward to the next issue of Azimuth, due in October 2013, dealing with Aesthetics and Politics.

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Azimuth 2/2013 | Aesthetics and Politics. Perspectives in Contemporary Philosophy

Edited by Federica Buongiorno
ISBN: 9788863725629

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If one tried answer the traditional Arendtian question about “human condition” today, from the point of view of our present times, one should undoubtedly say that the very proper feature of contemporary human beings is their inter-connectivity – their connectedness to the world as well to ways of sharing it and inhabiting it. We don’t use this term lightly: “inter-connectivity” means not only “interconnection”, which of course refers to the social, cultural, and political bonds that make possible our living-together. These relationships have always been part of human societies and represent a traditional topic of (political-)philosophical thought. More precisely (and maybe even more radically), “inter-connectivity” also refers to the sphere of relations mediated by technics and its applications: relations that define – more extensively and pervasively than in both ancient and modern times – not only our current living together in social and cultural systems, but also our being human. With the development and very recent improvement of an impressive amount of technical “supports” in all the main branches of life, there has arisen a profound modification of human being, namely of the human being’s perceptive abilities and aesthetic regimes. This modification coincides with a new concept of politics – to be more precise, with new forms of governance of these “modified” human beings. This second issue of Azimuth focuses on a specific range of problems arising from the new aesthetico-political arrangement (or governance) of the “human condition”. The glance through different fields of research, as it is offered in this issue, finally flows into an authentic, reinforced request for philosophy: whatever tradition or point of view we might assume, we have to think – as always, one could say, but in a completely different horizon – about the human condition, and the possible and effective meaning of these terms – human, condition – today.

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