Systems and Knowledge
18-20/02/2026, Venice

The history of philosophy explores how thought and knowledge have been organized, and the forms they take. Central to this inquiry is the tension between systematic and non-systematic approaches, and the kinds of knowledge they produce.

From Aristotle’s architectonic sciences to Hegel’s speculative system, systematic form has often defined philosophy as a distinctive intellectual practice. Even the Enlightenment, while critical of abstract metaphysics, retained a concern for coherence, distinguishing a “systematic spirit” grounded in experience from a “spirit of system” imposing artificial order. Yet systematic thinking has also faced sharp critique: Nietzsche, for instance, saw systems as evasions of reality, while aphoristic and fragmentary forms offered alternative ways to express philosophical insight.

Systematic form is not the only path to philosophical knowledge. Its features, at the very least, must be carefully delineated—a task undertaken during the Enlightenment and continued in later thinkers such as Nietzsche. Historians of philosophy must navigate the interplay of coherence, contradiction, and context, asking how knowledge emerges both within and beyond systematic structures.

The presupposition of an essential link between systematic form and genuine philosophical knowledge has also served to distinguish legitimate philosophies from illegitimate ones, privileging certain discursive forms over others (for example, the treatise over the letter). We may therefore ask: how have non-systematic forms of thought been received, interpreted, or marginalized in the history of philosophy?

We welcome contributions examining the forms, functions, and reception of systematic and non-systematic thought, and how philosophical knowledge has been shaped, challenged, or marginalized throughout history.

The concepts of system and the demand for systematicity have sometimes been reduced to mere relics of modern philosophy. It seems that Western thought reached the culmination and end of systematic form with Hegel, and the last two centuries promoted a progressive dissolution of all structure, both in philosophy and in the arts, culminating in deconstruction. If this reading registers the abandonment of the totalizing nature typical of modern philosophical systems, did systematicity really ever disappear from the philosophical toolkit?

Far from being merely a way of exposing philosophical ideas, systematicity has appeared as intrinsically linked to scientific endeavor already in Aristotle’s definition of episteme as systematic and hierarchized knowledge. On the one hand, systematicity proves to be an essential precondition for the coherence and unity of different ideas within a comprehensive vision. On the other hand, the structured organization of knowledge facilitates its intelligibility, avoiding the pitfalls of overly fragmented styles or self-referential private languages. In this sense, we encourage contributions that explore the present and future of the systematic exigency for philosophical production.

Moreover, systems have not only represented a form, method, or style for philosophy, but have also been an autonomous object of inquiry. From cybernetics to the philosophy of biology, from linguistics to complexity theory, philosophy has never ceased to investigate different types and structures of systems in order to better understand the world. Even today, the hybridization of disciplinary boundaries, the increasing awareness of the problems associated with reductionism, and the deeper focus on ecosystems rather than individual organisms are all challenges that require us to continue thinking in and through systems. In this sense, we invite proposals that highlight the insightfulness and fecundity of systemic thought for current scientific endeavors.

Political philosophy has traditionally been grounded in broader systems of theoretical knowledge, as if it were almost the logical consequence of a 'first philosophy', whether in the form of metaphysics, theology, ontology, or an immanent logical structure of reality. However, it is possible to interpret any given philosophical system as an ideological construct arising from a historically determined political stance – as exemplified, most prominently, by the historical materialism approach.

What remains inescapable, however, is the link between systems of knowledge and political formations: regardless of how this complex relationship is understood, it persists even in approaches that adopt an explicitly anti-systematic stance. Even in the contemporary context – which, in contrast to the twentieth century, appears marked by a diminished intensity of ideological conflict – the constitution of political orders invariably entails a systematic reconfiguration of the epistemic frameworks upon which they are based. Nowadays, these epistemic frameworks are increasingly built on top of a vast technological infrastructure, which functions both as a producer of meaning and as a tool for the management of the political.

From economic management to e-commerce and e-government, from logistics to warfare, knowledge is today continuously extracted and encoded into complex technical arrangements for the purpose of planning and executing a wide range of operations, with AI at the forefront of this development. Our daily activities are increasingly data-driven, and human-machine interactions have become an inescapable part of our everyday lives. The knowledge continuously produced and retrieved by humans now serves as the foundation for the construction of complex interactive systems, whose political implications are constantly evolving and far from transparent.

What does it mean, in fact, to be simultaneously co-producers and users of complex, distributed knowledge systems, in an era when the boundary between cognitive and manual labor, public and private space, productive and unproductive work, seem to blur? We look to address these questions through the lens of political philosophy, seeking a theoretical renovation of its lexicon to address the challenges that contemporary knowledge systems are posing to us.

We invite contributions that explore both the historical dimensions of political thought and contemporary challenges in political philosophy and political epistemology.

Globalization, acceleration and unpredictability are defining traits of the contemporary era. In this complex and interconnected context, education is called to reconfigure its pedagogic paradigms overcoming a fragmented transmission of knowledge in favor of a systemic and transdisciplinary approach. This implies a shift from objects to relationships, from measurements to mappings, from quantities to qualities, from structures to processes (Capra and Luisi, 2015). This means changing the ethical, epistemological, ontological and political assumptions through which the educational phenomenon is observed (Mortari, 2020). The panel welcomes contributions reflecting on the role of a systemic approach to education in fostering forms of learning that integrate and contextualize knowledge, attitudes, and values in response to the challenges of complexity (Bocchi and Ceruti, 2020), while supporting human flourishing by expanding the real opportunities individuals have to develop and lead meaningful lives.