Abstract

Evandro Agazzi’s epistemological consideration of the objectivity in the sciences fully legitimates the rationality of metaphysical inquiry as well as the embedding of science into broader contexts of moral, social and political nature.

His main argument is the intrinsic limitation of any object assumed by a particular science, when human knowledge always takes into account reality as a whole. Science cannot exclude the questioning of the whole as such; much more, each specialized field of scientific research suffers a kind of contingency. Such a logical defense of the legitimacy of metaphysics was for me a strong support in building my own theory on the relationship between common sense and metaphysical research, whose goal is the rational mediation of the immediate certainties about the whole, namely the discovery of the causes of the existence of beings and the determination of their true nature. Unifying Agazzi’s epistemological justification of metaphysics with Gilson’s theory of realism as the very method of metaphysics, I was able to give a critical definition of ‘common sense’ as the primary truth in approaching reality—a truth that, although pre-scientific, is absolutely undeniable and so makes metaphysics as a science possible.

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Source: Alai M., Buzzoni M., Tarozzi G. (eds.). Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility: Evandro Agazzi in the Contemporary Scientific and Philosophical Debate. Springer,2015. — 337 pp.. 2015

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