From the Aristotelian Categories to the Kantian Critical Trichotomy?
On the occasion of the presentation, at the University of Genoa, of the challenging and complex “encyclopaedic” volume Filosofia, Scienza e Bioetica nel dibattito contemporaneo. Studi internazionali in onore di Evandro Agazzi (which I organized, edited and published in Rome, 2007, in the prestigious series of the Presidency of the Italian Council of Ministers, see Minazzi 2007a), Carlo Penco shrewdly observed
F.
Minazzi (*)Centro Internazionale Insubrico, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy
e-mail: fabio.minazzi@uninsubria.it
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 1
M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_1 that, to speak comprehensively and coherently of Agazzi’s work and thought, one might properly invoke the celebrated Aristotelian categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality. As analytically shown by the first systematic and chronological bibliography of Agazzi’s output (which significantly concluded the volume mentioned above[1]), the “quantity” of works produced by him, in a life of intense labour, is truly extraordinary. In fact, by exploring Agazzi’s works and days one discovers that his life has been configured, first and foremost, as a constant effort and unflagging commitment to research, study and reflection, which has left a highly significant mark in his publications (more than a thousand in the period between 1955 and 2006, though his activity has also been pursued steadily until today). The arithmetic and aseptic average of some dozen publications a year records this methodical work unfolding from the years of his university education to those of his maturity. But in addition to the quantity of this production we have also to bear in mind, naturally and most importantly, its intrinsic quality, with the output over time of works that have had a profound impact on the Italian epistemological research as well as in the context of the international debate.
Indeed the many languages which Agazzi has used in the course of his life to present his thoughts are always closely intertwined, giving rise to a very significant international presence. This is, of course, hardly the place to retrace Agazzi’s extraordinary career in teaching and research, his work as a visiting professor (which has taken him to a number of European and American universities), or his intense activity as a lecturer (which has taken him to almost every continent and many countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, North America and Latin America). Not to mention the numerous academic appointments and positions in Italian and foreign scientific associations, or his widely varied editorial responsibilities, the numbers of awards, accolades and honorary degrees he has received and much else. However, precisely the admirable sum of these appointments and all these different cultural and editorial responsibilities helps us to better understand not only the specific quality of his scientific work, but also the distinctive nature of the multiple international relations that Agazzi has succeeded in forming and building in the course of his scientific and philosophical research. Therefore, speaking of Agazzi is speaking of a philosopher who has always placed himself in an international context, up to the point that his cultural presence abroad has come to be even more significant than his presence in the Italian context, where he has worked well for an entire academic life. Last but not least, precisely the consideration of the intrinsic quality of his multiple international relations enables us to finally clarify Agazzi’s modality of “doing philosophy”. This modality has always been that of a dialogue and debate at the highest international level, in exchange with the chief interlocutors of the different traditions of thought in the different continents. Penco was thus right to evoke the celebrated Aristotelian categories in presenting a concise and unified overview of Agazzi’s work, because the quantity of his publications, their intrinsic quality, as well as the many international relations and the specific modalities with which Agazzi has made, step by step, his intellectual journey, in their problematic and dynamic whole, constitute a sparkling jewel and an extraordinary cultural polyhedron that is noteworthy for its intrinsic theoretical, purposeful and organizational texture.However, without denying the heuristic interest of this Aristotelian reference, I think that to grasp dynamically the same qualitative as well as quantitative growth in Agazzi’s work, it is perhaps appropriate to follow another suggestion, that which Immanuel Kant delineated in the final pages of his Critique of Pure Reason, where he notes how, in the last analysis, the fundamental questions that man must seek to answer by philosophical reflection are basically only three: What can we know? What ought we to do? What may be hoped? Three seemingly “simple”, and perhaps even “banal”, questions but from which arises a powerful critical trichotomy that Kant develops within his innovative and fruitful perspective of transcendentalism. For this particular reason the domain of knowledge concerns, according to Kant, the descriptive and prescriptive order of scientific objectivity and cognitive truth (that is, the nature of human knowledge), while the question concerning duty makes reference to the prescriptive and legal order of ethical correctness, and the normative rules which assume, in society, the form of our particular moral duty; finally hope refers to the self-reflexive order of emancipation and authenticity, precisely the teleological order inserted and rooted in the world of praxis. As I have illustrated in my book devoted to the Teleology of Knowledge and Eschatology of Hope? this fruitful Kantian critical trichotomy configures, for the whole of Europe and in general for human civilization, a complex and highly articulated philosophical and civil project, in which knowledge and freedom constitute two different yet intertwined terms in a single movement of social self-emancipation. Its driving force is precisely that historical utopia that, in the form of hope, is the keystone of this dynamic and always open-ended tension, between the critical increase of knowledge and the gradual broadening of the civil legacy of freedoms and human rights. This Kantian critical trichotomy, however, went into crisis with the Hegelian and Romantic turning-point that split the ties between knowledge and freedom, delineating a grotesque dichotomy in which the three Kantian transcendental orders were inevitably reduced to three specific historical spheres of pragmatic activities.
In this way knowledge was reduced to mere technical instrumentality at the service of economic labour, while the moral plane was dissolved in the dimension of inter-subjective communicational language, and hope was reduced to the need for a liberating mythical praxis, self-reflexive and symbolic, which finally found its emblematic historical expression in the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology.[2] [3]However, precisely the heuristic strength of the Kantian critical trichotomy offers, at least in my opinion, an adequate hermeneutical instrument to better understand not only our own time but also Agazzi’s path of philosophical reflection and its progressive critical and speculative expansion. Agazzi, in fact, made his scholarly debut with the volume Introduzione ai problemi dell’assiomatica (1961), through which he became known as a fine philosopher of science who mastered, with high expertise, the debate related to mathematical logic and the tradition of Hilbert’s formalism, in particular. His first studies were mainly (but not exclusively) devoted to logical issues (for example, with Logica simbolica of 1964 and with various other entries on mathematical logic appeared in 1967 in the Enciclopedia filosofica of the Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate), but Agazzi then published a significant and important epistemological work, Temi e problemi di filosofia della fisica (1969) in which his theoretical interests take into more direct consideration the problem of physical knowledge in all its paradigmatic value. Agazzi has never abandoned his initial interest in logical-mathematical thinking, as is attested not only by the book La simmetria which he edited in 1973, and above all by his many studies of mathematical logic which have more recently been collected in his volume Ragioni e limiti del for- malismo (2012), which republished essays in the philosophy of logic and mathematics that appeared along almost the whole of Agazzi’s scientific work.
It is a fact, however, that this constant interest for reflection within the logical-mathematical framework is then woven with a progressive and significant expansion of his speculative interests, to include the philosophy of physics and the epistemological significance of the history of science and the notion of progress (to which he devoted a volume on Il concetto di progresso nella scienza, published in 1976). Let us simply remember the demanding publication of the chief work of a classic of science such as Maxwell: Agazzi made the annotated Italian translation of his celebrated Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, (published in two volumes in 1973 in the “Classici della scienza” series founded and directed by Geymonat for UTET in Turin). So if in 1978 Agazzi published Le geometrie non euclidee e i fondamenti della geometria (written in collaboration with Dario Palladino), in the same years he also embarked on a reflection on the problem of meaning, to which he devoted a collective volume of Studi sul problema del significato, which he edited in 1979; it brought together the results of a celebrated major seminar he had organized and directed for many years at the University of Genoa. Also in these years he published as editor Modern Logic. A Survey (1981) and authored several papers dealing with the relations between science and religion (Science et foi. Perspectives nouvelles sur un vieux probleme, 1983, and Il pensiero cristiano nella filosofia italiana del Novecento, 1980). He also promoted and edited a collective Storia delle scienze (1984, in two volumes), a reflection on Weissheit im Technischen (1986) as well as a comprehensive stocktaking of La filosofia della scienza in Italia nel ’900 (1986), without failing to investigate the links between Philosophie, Sciences, Metaphysique (1987), the relations between Linguaggio comune e linguaggio scientifico (1987), the problem of L’objectivite dans les differentes sciences (1988), Probability in the Sciences (1988), a theoretical debate (conducted in open and sincere dialogue with Geymonat and the present writer) on the relations between Filosofia, Scienza e Verita (1989), the analysis of the relations between Logica matematica e logica filosofica (1990), as well as a question on Quale etica per la bioetica? (1990), La comparability des theories scienti- fiques (1990), The Problem of Reductionism in Science (1991), the study of the link between Science et sagesse (1991), and the investigation of Philosophy and the Origin and Evolution of the Universe (edited in collaboration with Alberto Cordero in 1991).This variety of investigations found a kind of emblematic and programmatic outcome in his ambitious monograph Il bene, il male e la scienza (1992, promptly translated into several languages: German, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and English), with which Agazzi’s reflection, after having dealt with many aspects of the broad field of objective knowledge as it is configured in many scientific disciplines, felt the need to also address certain ethical issues directly relevant to the ambit of duty that oversteps the horizon of knowledge as such. To this perspective also belong, moreover, other publications in the field of moral philosophy, such as the collective volumes which he promoted and edited on topics such as Bioetica e persona (1993), Philosophy and Cultural Development (edited with Ioanna Kuguradi in 1993). This astonishing plurality of interests and energy of scientific production in Agazzi’s intellectual life and profession is testified by the simple listing of some of his publications in the last two decades: Cultura sci- entifica e interdisciplinary (1994), Filosofia della natura. Scienza e cosmologia (1995), Le techno-science et l’identite de l’homme contemporain (1997), Realism and Quantum Physics (ed. 1997), Philosophy of Mathematics Today (edited with Gyorgy Darvas in 1997), Advances in the Philosophy of Technology (edited with Hans Lenk, in 1999), The Problem of the Unity of Science (edited with Jan Faye, in 2001), Complexity and Emergence (edited with Luisa Montecucco, in 2002), Valori e limiti del senso comune (2004), Operations and Constructions in Science (edited with Christian Tiel, in 2006), Science and Ethics. The Axiologic Contexts of Science (edited with Minazzi, in 2008), Le rivoluzione scientifiche e il mondo moderno (2008), Relations Between Human Sciences and Natural Sciences (edited with Giuliano Di Bernardo in 2010), Evolutionism and Religion (edited with Minazzi in 2011), La ciencia y el alma de Occidente (2011), Ragioni e limiti del formalismo, Saggi di filosofia della logica e della matematica (edited with a Foreword by Minazzi in 2012), Representation and Explanation in the Sciences (ed. 2013), The Legacy of A.M. Turing (ed. 2013).
This already intense and exceptionally fruitful program of research, study and reflection then finds a significant culmination and theoretical crowning in the publication of his most recent work, looked forward to for some twenty years, his systematic study Scientific Objectivity and its Contexts, published by Springer in 2014.
As shown even by this concise and elliptical overview of the most important volumes published and edited by Agazzi in over fifty years of scientific and academic research, it can certainly be said that this thinker, building initially on a strictly epistemological study, has gradually expanded his research program, taking into consideration many problems and issues that have ultimately led him to develop a broader, more systematic and “complete” philosophical reflection, capable of dealing with moral philosophy and the very significance of the presence of man in history. Precisely for this reason I evoked the Kantian critical trichotomy above. Not so much to place Agazzi’s thought forcibly under the “Kantian bushel” (the reasons for his evident critical distance from the horizon of the Kantian critique are too many and also extremely profound, see below), but rather to highlight how the overall articulation of his scientific-philosophical research enables us to grasp, thanks to the Kantian critical trichotomy, the whole openness and the rhythm of the theoretical breadth of his original proposals. This is also because, as Kant himself well knew, these three different questions concerning knowledge, duty, and hope, are reduced, ultimately, to a single, strategically decisive question: what is humanity? And Agazzi himself arrived rather early at such a reflection on humanity, considered from multiple points of view, and he significantly argued that, in his view, the main problem of contemporary culture (to put it in his own paradoxical words) is trying to “prove the existence of man” with the same commitment that in other times philosophy has devoted to the task of proving the existence of God.
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