Theoretical philosophy
- Overview
- Assessment methods
- Learning objectives
- Contents
- Bibliography
- Teaching methods
- Contacts/Info
None.
The exam is oral and will be held in a unique session at the end of the course.
However, the professor reserves the faculty to make a preliminary verification in the form of short written questions about the main topics of the course, whose dates and modalities will be announced both during the lessons and on the Insubria E-learning platform.
In order to stimulate the development of critical skills and judgment autonomy, each student must choose a topic among those of the course and do a work of personal deepening, starting from what is said in the main text of reference and integrating it with one or two other texts, freely chosen among the suggested ones. The exposition will be exclusively oral: neither written texts nor PowerPoint presentations will be accepted. If necessary, the professor may eventually complete the exam by asking some questions about both the exposition of the student and other topics of the course.
As for the attribution of the final grade, both the intrinsic value of the deepening work and the quality of the exposition of each student, as well as the answers to the eventual questions, will be considered, particularly evaluating the level of personalization and the critical consciousness. If the written preliminary verification has actually been done, it will be considered, too, although its relevance will be minor with respect to the result of the oral exam.
The main objective of the course is to investigate the origins of modernity and its peculiar way of thinking, paying a special attention to its relationships with science and Galilean experimental method, on which they pretend to be based, while the thesis we will maintain here is that they are actually based on a “closed” idea of reason, which not only has nothing to do with the one which is characteristic of science but rather is its exact opposite.
Second, we will try to show the consequences, both theorical and practical, of such paradoxical situation, the main ones being the following two:
a) an ever deeper fracture between humanistic and scientific culture, which is continuously producing contrapositions between each other, without any objective reason, since they actually arise from mere misunderstandings, but with consequences more and more dangerous, considering the increasing influence which science has in our life, both at the level of our vision of the world and of the practical organization of our society;
b) the progressive affirmation of what might be called “practical mechanicism”, that is an increasing tendency towards the mechanization of our social and even personal life, what is risking generating an authentic new form of totalitarianism, which claims to be based on science, but actually has its roots in a precise philosophical tradition, whose inconsistency has been demonstrated precisely by modern science, although, despite this, it is still the dominant one in our world.
The final objective is to enable the students to use what they have learned during the course to evaluate from a new and more adequate point of view the main commonplaces of modern mentality.
Considering the peculiar typology of the students of the course of studies in Sciences of Communication, who usually do not have a strong scientific background, first of all the course will try to provide the knowledge needed for a correct understanding of the topic, through the presentation of some of the most important steps in the history of science and the direct contact with the world of scientific research. So, the students will have a personal experience of what kind of reasoning is at work in the phase of scientific discovery, which is very different from the exposition of the outcomes in school books and even more from the presentation usually provided by mass-media.
So, first of all, the crucial steps in the development of science will be explained: its birth by Galileo, its progressive affirmation thanks, above all, to Newton’s theory of gravitation; then Boltzmann’s statistical thermodynamics, electromagnetism, Einstein’s relativity, atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, deterministic chaos, fractal geometry and the emerging of complexity. At the same time, it will be explained why the authentic scientific method is deeply different from how it is described by modern epistemology and scientistic vulgate, being based on an idea of reason structurally open to reality and hence also to the unexpected and the mystery, so that not only science is not an enemy of human and religious values, but rather it is their best ally.
On the other side, we will show the radical misunderstanding of the scientific method made by Descartes and his new idea of reason radically closed to experience, which has determined the course of philosophical thinking during the next four centuries, finally becoming the authentic “central dogma of modernity”, that nowadays practically nobody is ready to question, despite the evidence of its failure.
Then, we will show the consequences that the affirmation of such mentality, which is passed off as scientific while in fact is radically opposite to science, has had and is still having in our life, at all levels (social, political, economic, ecological, personal and even affective), often in ways not immediately evident, but nonetheless absolutely real and concrete.
Finally, we will try to suggest a possible solution, which will necessarily start from the recovery of the right relationship with reality, respect to which science, if correctly understood, can provide us a greatest help.
The main reference text is:
Paolo Musso, La scienza e l’idea di ragione, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2011.
Other important texts to which reference will often be made are:
Stanley Jáki, La strada della scienza e le vie verso Dio
Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo
René Descartes, Discorso sul metodo
Luigi giussani, La coscienza religiosa nell’uomo moderno
George Orwell, 1984
Václav Havel, Il potere dei senza potere
Hannah Arendt, La banalità del male
James Gleick, Caos
Benoît Mandelbrot, Il disordine dei mercati
Evandro Agazzi, Scientific objectivity and its contexts (to be published in Italian very soon)
Obviously, not all those texts should be studied for the exam, but only one, which will be used to deepen the topic that each student will discuss during the exam (see “Modalities of learning verification”)
A wider list of suggested texts will be provided, together with a more detailed information about their use both during the course and the exam, in a specific file which will be uploaded to the Insubria E-learning platform (see “Further information”).
Educational activity will be developed through frontal lessons, supported by a very detailed set of PowerPoint presentations and other multimedia tools, including some talks and interviews recorded by the professor himself during international scientific congresses which he has personally attended.
If possible, depending on the conditions and the available funds, there will be also some moments of dialogue with some significative personalities and/or some guided visits to places of interest for the topics discussed during the course.
Finally, it is strongly suggested the participation in “Science & Science-Fiction”, a series of lectures and guided visits related with the course of Science and Science-Fiction in Media and Literature of our Master’s Degree, in which some topics which are treated also in the course of Theoretical Philosophy will be deepened.
Students may talk to the professor at the end of each lesson of the course. In the presence of adequate reasons, also by appointment, to be agreed with the professor by phone or e-mail.
More precise details about the course and the exam will be provided each year in a special file entitled “Descrizione del corso e modalità di esame”, which will be uploaded before the beginning of the lessons in the E-learning platform of the Insubria University. Students are therefore kindly requested to download it as soon as possible and to read it very carefully in all its parts.