Introduction
Focusing on the main lines of Evandro Agazzi’s philosophical anthropology is an operation which may be conditioned by two objective factors. The first is connected to the vast production of the author in this field: well over one hundred works, including books, articles and contributions, which are inserted fully and organically in an even larger amount of scientific works.
The other factor a careful student of the work of Agazzi cannot avoid grasping is the anthropological valueM. Negro (*)
Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, Catania, Italy e-mail: negro.unict@gmail.com © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_15
of his entire production, even of what is most clearly dedicated to very specific epistemological issues (such as philosophy of mathematics, of logic, or of physics). In this sense it is really difficult to separate or isolate the single items of Agazzi’s thought, which always have a unitary form. The way in which Agazzi intends to explore the dynamics of knowledge, metaphysics, or of language, just to mention some of his many subjects of research, is not only inseparable from his idea of human being, but it is in fact its most direct consequence and expression.
Agazzi has shown that the sciences are among the highest forms of humanism, that knowledge in its multiplicity is a high expression of the human spirit, as well as an excellent demonstration of its existence. In doing so, he reversed the usual way in which we relate science to persons. Knowledge about people should not be cultivated only by those few areas of culture that make no use of experimental methods; on the contrary, Agazzi has always claimed that the existence and nature of human beings can be demonstrated just by using as a point of comparison the field of experience, accepting the challenge of the sciences on their own ground, discerning somehow in their acquisitions a broader perspective, and defusing potential closures or epistemological reductionisms.
Anthropology cannotbe identified with psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology or linguistics, each of which considers man from a specific and restricted angle. Nor can it be seen as the sum of these particular disciplines, but rather as the attempt to afford a global image of man in which the information provided by these sciences (and several others as well) can be harmonized and receive a sense, taking into consideration at the same time other aspects of human reality that are not the subject matter of scientific investigation (Agazzi 2007: 383).
Ultimately, it is illusory to speak of a scientific image of the entire human reality as it is illusory to assume a complete scientific image of any particular reality. Taking up a suggestion of Wilfrid Sellars’, Agazzi invites us to verify the validity of the scientific image of human nature and its epistemic compatibility with the corresponding ‘manifest’ image.
But concentrating here on the works that mainly focus on philosophical anthropology, we will highlight those aspects which are undeniably crucial to this process of reflection.
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