HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY - I

NB: this is a course on two inseparable periods. For those who, due to curricular requirements, only attend the first or second part of the course, the examination will focus solely on the corresponding part.
The course falls within the common core subjects of the degree course in philosophy and aims at providing students with the necessary methodological tools for a critical learning of the main historical-philosophical issues of contemporary times, also in connection with other knowledge and research fields. In particular, the teaching objectives are aimed at the acquisition of the understanding, knowledge and critical interpretation of the main contemporary philosophical texts.

The course aims to provide in-depth knowledge of the philosophers and the most important historical and cultural contexts, of the problems of contemporary times and of the increasingly close interrelationship between the various 'specialised' fields of knowledge.
For these reasons, the didactic task is to provide knowledge and to train comprehension skills so that the student can build a critical autonomy of judgement and correct linguistic and communicative skills.

In order to deal effectively with the contents of the course, the student must have acquired the following during the three-year course: mastery of the philosophical vocabulary; knowledge of the fundamental themes and junctures of the history of philosophy.

Life: the organism, the human, the social. Contemporary French-language philosophy.

An introduction to the history of French philosophy from the revolution of 1789 to the 1980s. We will focus on:
1. on philosophical movements in relation to historical moments: sensualism and associationism, eclecticism and positivism, spiritualism, phenomenology and existentialism, (post)structuralism
2. On a series of problems: possibility of knowledge and its foundation, intersubjectivity, society and political, the relationship of philosophy to the other disciplines of the human sciences.
3. On the borrowings of French philosophy in relation to texts and intellectual transformations in Europe.

During the second period, we will focus particularly on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze.

For the first period: parts of the following texts, all available on Moodle.

Maine de Biran, Introduzione all'influenza dell'abitudine sulla facoltà di pensare
Maine de Biran, Sull'appercezione immediata
Ravaisson, Dell’abitudine
Comte, Discorso sullo spirito positivo
Lachelier, Il fondamento dell’induzione
Boutroux, La contingenza delle leggi della natura
Durkheim, Le regole del metodo sociologico
Bergson, L’energia spirituale

The programme for the second term will be available shortly.

The final examination will be oral, consisting of a dozen open-ended questions and a short essay on one of the topics covered during the course, to be submitted two weeks before the oral examination. Students who wish to give a short presentation (in the form of a short lecture) will be exempted from one or two questions.

oral

Grading will follow departmental guidelines.

Teaching will be divided into
- into a frontal teaching part, in which the lecturer will introduce students to the course topics
- and a dialogue-seminar part, in which students will be asked to prepare short lectures.

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Human capital, health, education" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development