Closing event of PRIN 2022 "Paradoxical Humanism and Environmentalism"

The closing conference of the PRIN PNRR 2022 project "Paradoxical Humanism and Environmentalism," which will be held Oct. 21-23, 2025 between the FedericoII Department of Humanistic Studies and the Department of Humanities, Philosophy and Education, of the University of Salerno, intends to continue the path of reflection begun with the mid-term conference The 'Invention' of Humanism and the 'Reconfiguration' of the Idea of Nature between the Second Half of the 18th and the End of the 19th Century (Naples Federico II, February 2025).The event aims first to examine the criticisms directed at the idea of humanism over the past decades, particularly from the front of "environmentalism," without neglecting the possible dialogue between humanism and environmentalist perspectives. Second, it intends to reflect on the internal tensions within the idea of humanism, constantly re-proposed and re-actualized in the Western cultural tradition, particularly in two epochal phases of the latter: 1) the first half of the 20th century, when, on the one hand, the historiographical category of humanism was consolidated and, on the other, thinkers such as Horkheimer, Sartre, and Heidegger questioned its re-proposition, its usefulness, and its possible declinations (including in political terms); 2) the 15th and 16th centuries, i.e., the season that historiography has retrospectively identified as the era of the flowering - in philology and philosophy - of modern humanism. Specifically, the conference plans to investigate tensions and paradoxes within humanistic projects, which emerge when the rhetorical and conceptual tools they employ are used to effect a decentralization of perspective, dethroning the human subject from its self-proclaimed and presumed centrality in the cosmos, in order to try to look at man from the point of view of the animal or again to rethink him in a plural space of living beings and nonliving entities.

The three-day event opens on Oct. 21, in DSU's former Wooden Catalogs room, starting at 9:30 a.m. with greetings from Andrea Mazzucchi, director of the Department of Humanities.