Audience of important occasions, which was sold out yesterday evening at the Readers’ Club in via Bogino 9, in Turin, for the presentation of “Philosophical and political writings. A journey of ideas and reflections” by Gianni Vattimo, published by The Ship of Theseus. The eighty-six-year-old philosopher arrived arm in arm with his university assistant Simone Caminada to attend the meeting with Gaetano Chiurazzi, Sergio Givone, Antonio Gnoli and Leonardo Messinese, introduced by Graziano Lingua and chaired by Maurizio Pagano. The appointment was curated by the “Luigi Pareyson” Center for Philosophical-Religious Studies.
This volume collects – for the first time – as the speakers explained “the philosophical and political writings of Vattimo, retracing the trajectory of his ideas: from reflections on the great masters of the twentieth century to the new perspectives of philosophical hermeneutics and weak thinking”. Vattimo’s philosophical vocation finds its roots in a religious education, sensitive to social and political aspects, in a historical and cultural context, in the mid-1950s, marked by liberal individualism and Marxist collectivism. (continued)
From a new Christian humanism to the formulation of weak thought
Enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Turin, Vattimo, under the guidance of Luigi Pareyson, sets himself the goal of “contributing to the formation of a new Christian humanism”. His research path, after Maritain and Mounier and the Frankfurt School, arrives in Heidelberg, alongside HG Gadamer, for a full immersion in Nietzsche’s nihilism and Heidegger’s existentialism. Two anti-moderns and anti-Christians who “paradoxically lead him back to the Christian faith or to something that closely resembles it” to a more properly “secularized” faith which is identified with the principle of caritas.
Gadamer, like Pareyson already, will induce Vattimo to deepen his interest in hermeneutics, a universal interpretative approach to be applied also in the political field. For his part, he will give resonance to the master and the discipline, even in our country, with the translation of “Truth and method” (1972), now a classic. Of the dozens of his publications, the one that aroused the most sensation and gave Vattimo a vast international recognition was the collective volume, edited with Pier Aldo Rovatti, The weak thought (1983), a reference text of postmodernism, whose first matrix it can be ascribed to Heidegger’s “Being and Time”.