International book reviews

Abstract

Per la verita. Relativismo e filosofia is the title of a recent essay written by Diego Marconi (Einaudi 2007), probably the most distinguished Italian philosopher of analytical orientation, author of seminal studies on Wittgenstein and brilliant pursuer of an approach which remains in many ways fundamentally Wittgenstenian. Evidence of this is provided by the central idea which pervades his recent pages, that is, the need to establish clarity in a quite confused philosophical and cultural debate; the need to draw on the analytic philosophy toolbox and take in some useful instruments to dissipate those obscurities—or those ‘‘pathologies of language’’— that proliferate around a theme which is very fashionable in Italy at the moment, being discussed not only by philosophers, but also by politicians, opinion makers, journalists and, more generally, by many different actors of the Offentlichkeit. The theme at issue has to do, roughly speaking, with truth and its relativity—in the context of a social and political speech that appears in many ways paralyzed by the reiterated appeal to the ‘‘high’’ values of truth or of relativism, and by the reiterated attempt to enlist into the party of the Truth or the party of its Relativity that elusive aspect of citizenship which, just by virtue of its own amorphous nature, becomes a decisive element in the shaping of public opinion.