Post-filosofie

«Post-filosofie» is an open place that welcomes everyone who wants to investigate, criticize and dialogue on the Human Knowledge with its peculiar forms of rationality.
Starting from the Issue Number 7, «Post-filosofie» is an online journal. It is easy to guess that the choice of a digital format depends on financial reasons: indeed, Italian humanistic research is structurally characterised by a shortage of funds. Nevertheless, making a virtue of necessity, the digital format allows to reach a wider audience, without renouncing the methodological rigour and the ethics of scientific inquiry.
Therefore, the original project that animated the printed version of «Post-filosofie» remains unchanged and still valid today. Furthermore, the online archive collects all the monographic numbers. Each Issue is characterised by heterogeneity and relevance of theoretical perspectives.

We believe that the philosophical practice cannot be reduced to a historiographical “rumination”, neither it can be considered as an end in itself. Rather, we believe that the archival and established research methods must face the challenges of the present.
From such a perspective, the – however inflated – prefix “post-” alludes to a double semantic layer: on the one hand, it refers to the pluralism of philosophical orientations and perspectives which indisputably characterise our present; on the other hand, “post-”designates the movement of torsion within the philosophical tradition, and the search for new languages and categories capable of thinking and understanding our present.
On this point we agree with Deleuze and Guattari when they affirm that “Philosophy cannot be reduced to its own history, because it continually wrests itself from this history in order to create new concepts that fall back into history but do not come from it” (G. Deleuze - F. Guattari,What is philosophy?).

In the light of these considerations, «Post-filosofie» aims at undertaking a critical delimitation of the history of philosophy (and, therefore, of metaphysics), refusing a self-referential perspective: such a critical approach rejects the tautological repetition of the Selfsame (as it happens in Heidegger), and the mere reconstruction of the special branches in which philosophical practice has gradually structured itself (ontology, gnoseology, ethics and so on), becoming an academic discipline. On the contrary, the work of critical delimitation not only accepts the challenges of thought, but it also includes the world in which we live in the field of philosophical experimentation, underlining the fecundity and limits of the concepts transmitted by the philosophical practice.

In this sense, philosophical practice preserves its intrinsic connotation of historical knowledge – as our dear Eugenio Garin would say. In the matter in question, the adjective “historical” has to be preserved in its profound meaning, avoiding the ever-present risk of museumization and reduction to a merely academic knowledge. From such a perspective, we believe that the philosopher has to accomplish four tasks, at least:

1. Starting from the aporiae of the present, and adopting a critical-genealogical approach, the philosopher has to reconstruct the process which led to the present-day proliferation of specialist and separated knowledges. More specifically, starting from birth of philosophy in Greece, the philosopher has to investigate the reasons of the separation between natural sciences and social sciences, or humanities. The philosopher cannot neglect any fields of human knowledge: from political to religious, from social to legal, from economic to psychological.
2. The philosopher has to explore the theoretical background (i.e., metaphysical, scientific, theological-political) of fundamental contemporary concepts, such as “democracy”, “citizenship”, “human rights”, “multiculturalism”, and so on.
3. The philosopher has to collect and theorise the instances of truth and justice that come from the contemporary society, preserving a reasonable and utopian approach.
4. The philosopher has to develop the criticism against the economic hubris of the present-day capitalism, recognising and giving voice to the multiple “differences” which are redefining contemporary subjectivities in new forms: starting from sexuality and gender, passing through ethnicity and religious sphere.

F.F.

F.R.R.L.