Podcast dia-logando 1 - Studiare filosofia oggi | ASIA | YouTubeToText
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The Asia Study Center is pleased to
present its new course,
entirely dedicated to philosophy,
exploring questions at the origins of
thought. Each week, the episode
will lead you into new
philosophical themes through the guidance of
important philosophers of our time.
Dialogando is available in both
video and podcast format on the website www.associazioneasia.it.
Today we speak with Professor Giovanni
Giorgini, professor of
political philosophy and the history of
political doctrines at the University
of Bologna. Why study
philosophy today?
A British colleague of mine, with his usual
English humor, answered this
question by saying why philosophy is
absolutely useless, and added that there is
nothing more beautiful than the empty kisses of
abstraction, and it's a beautiful
phrase. He's a formidable writer, his
name is Michael
Oakhot, and he died in 1990. I used
this line of attack when I took
the exam to become a
high school teacher, and when they asked me,
professor, how would you persuade your
students to study philosophy? I tried
this line with my examiner, in
that case a good high school teacher
from Reggio Emilia smiled, but he waited
until the end for my argument,
so perhaps this is not the
most correct line of attack. Well, today
philosophy has become a very
specialized subject. If one looks at the subjects
taught in the Faculty of
Letters and Philosophy, there are many
types of philosophy: from aesthetics, to the
philosophy of science, to the
political philosophy that I teach, to metaphysics,
moral philosophy and many other
specializations, philosophy of
language and so on.
Um, but I continue to think that
beyond these
specializations there is an idea of
philosophy which is ultimately still the one
invented by Plato. I
think that Plato, if not then
inventing the name philosophy, which already
existed, gave that name
philosophy, the search for wisdom, the love
of wisdom, the meaning it
later had throughout the history of
Western thought: that is, as a search for
wisdom based on a notion of
dialectics, that is, examining hypotheses,
seeing if they stand up
to our refutation, and when
a hypothesis is unable to withstand
the objections we can
raise, it means that the hypothesis is
invalid. If we take this
general idea of philosophy that I
still believe to be valid, then I think philosophy
still has a fundamental importance both
both
in teaching and in our
everyday life because, well, it
's not my Socratic phase, right? It's true, the
unexamined life isn't worth
living when we go about our
daily lives
without rationally weighing the pros and
cons, without considering that we
are not directors watching
ourselves live, no, like in a movie, but
we are, alas, the leading actors
in our own lives.
These notions, in my opinion, come to us from
a correct philosophical education,
therefore philosophy in this more
general, non-specialist sense, as our
personal search for truth or
simply, more modestly,
dissatisfaction with
received opinions. Well, in my opinion this is
still a valid idea and a good
reason to study philosophy. My
basic idea, no, of my answer is
that beyond this
specialized, specialist philosophy that has been
created, there exists an ancient, but
not for this reason antiquated, notion of philosophy
as a way of life. Philosophy as a
way of life and therefore also,
no, as our personal search for
our own truth and our own
image of happiness. And I'm a
little more critical of practices
like philosophical counseling or
life coaching, right? The fact that
English terms are used
to describe them is already impressive, right? we don't have
our own Italian term, they show that these are
, in my opinion,
little ways of using
philosophy, little formulas designed
to make managers who make a lot of
money rich at peace with their own
conscience and things of that sort. I
'm a little more skeptical
about this classic image of
philosophy as a way of life, that is,
thinking that it's inconsistent, if not
absurd, to think that someone can study philosophy for 3-4 years
or even more and then it won't
change them at all. Well, this
actually seems really absurd to me.
Old Aristotle said it in the first
lectures he gave, no, later collected
in the Nicomachean Ethics. You didn't
come here to hear what the idea
of good is, did you? The attack was Plato,
of course, but to become good.
Well, I still think that one cannot
take 20 philosophy exams or even
many more like studying so many
texts, reading these great authors and
then afterwards living exactly the same
way, right? Knowing that
contradiction is something—no, not just
logically wrong, but morally
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