Introduction

Well known internationally as one of the most prominent philosophers of science of our times, Evandro Agazzi has also elaborated speculative researches in the most important areas of philosophy.

A. Marcos (*)

University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain e-mail: amarcos@fyl.uva.es © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_20

has left us on Modernity, a reflection that borders on philosophy of history and on that of society and culture. In this respect, Agazzi has given a very fecund contri­bution. He has argued that the search for autonomy is one of the essential traits of Modernity. From this finding, he has detected one of the most decisive causes of our contemporary cultural uneasiness, i.e. the very excesses of autonomy. Besides that, he has also identified and developed an adequate cure for this pathology: the systemic approach.

I will try to present such original contributions of Evandro Agazzi to today’s phi­losophy. To begin with (Sect. 2), I will discuss on Modernity as a search for auton­omy. This claim for autonomy appears in largely heterogeneous fields. We will actually confront ourselves with the autonomy of the subject, and with that of nations structured in modern times, with the autonomy or separation of powers, as proposed by Locke and Montesquieu, but also with the reciprocal autonomy of the different spiritual and practical fields of human life, especially art, morality and science.

The central problem, at the dawning of Modernity, was how to obtain and increase the autonomy starting from the hierarchic relations typical of ancient and medieval times. In the present days instead, the problem has changed radi­cally. It consists, actually, in finding the way to balance the excesses derived from the reciprocal isolation between different fields of human life, i.e. we try to overcome—in the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset—“the barbarism of specializa­tion”, we beg for integration procedures, but trying at the same time to avoid a return to hierarchical relations.

The matter, right now, is not so much the subjects’ autonomy, as the possibility to avoid their isolation and pathological disaggregation, so that the success obtained in autonomy will not become its own nemesis; it is not so much a question of autonomy of nations, but, rather, of inserting the latter in a super-national or global order; it is not, again, a question of the autonomy of science, but, rather, of its inte­gration in the whole building of knowledge and, on the other hand, in the whole of human life, avoiding to fall back into a hierarchical relation, which this time would inevitably conduct us to the supremacy of science. We are not confronted then with an eminently modern problem, but with a problem generated by modernity, and not by its failure, but by its very success, maybe even excessive, in pursuing autonomy.

It seems obvious that a comprehensive philosophy of science should be involved seriously in the correct integration between science and all the other aspects of human life, primarily because the most popular positions in this respect are not very satisfactory. On one hand, in fact, scientism asserts a sort of suprem­acy of science on life and expresses a superiority of the scientific vision of the world. On the other hand, its most radical critics foster an anti-scientific mentality which results like-wise inappropriate. It is necessary to consider if there is a mid­way between the extremes—both rebuttable, in Agazzi’s judgment—of scientism and anti-science.

To attempt a reply to this question, in a second passage (Sect. 3), I will refer to the systemic approach proposed by Evandro Agazzi. This systemic perspective intends society just as a system, inside which there are various subsystems recipro­cally related to each other. Therefore science and technology are both interpreted as social subsystems. With such premises, it is clear that the philosophy of science may develop itself as a social philosophy and a theory of society. The “toolbox” of the philosopher of science becomes much heavier: without setting aside logic, semantics and epistemology, it seems necessary to be equipped with an adequate knowledge of social theory and practical philosophy. Today, this convergence of domains appears unavoidable. On one side, techno-science seems a factor that cannot be set aside in the configuration of society. It is not possible anymore to understand contemporary society while ignoring the techno-scientific factor. On the other hand, instead, the very social aspects of techno-science demand atten­tion. Science and technology would appear incomprehensible without an accurate interpretation of their social aspects and their links with other social subsystems. Agazzi’s thesis may, therefore, help us today to overcome the challenge of inte­grating techno-science in the whole of human life.

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