Towards (Back to?) a Philosophical Education

Abstract

Born in 1936 in Turin (Italy), Gianni Vattimo hardly needs any introduction, as his pensiero debole (weak thought) has for decades been recognized as a major contribution contemporary philosophy. Vattimo graduated from the University of Turin under the supervision of his teacher and later friend Luigi Pareyson. Before being appointed as an assistant professor (1964), and later as a full professor of aesthetics (1969) at the same university, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg as a Humboldt Scholarship recipient, where he studied under Hans-Georg Gadamer. In addition having led seminars and lectured at many institutions around the world, he has also served as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States including Yale, Los Angeles, New York University, and State University of New York. In the 1970s he served as dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and from 1982 2009 he held the position of full professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. Among numerous honorary degrees and recognitions, Vattimo has received the Max Planck Award for Humanities (1992), the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking (2002), and the President's Medal from Georgetown University (2006), and was appointed a Grand Officer of the Italian Order of Merit in 1997. In 2010 he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow and presently holds the position of vice president of the Academy of Latinity. Besides his academic career, Vattimo has also participated in and hosted several successful TV programmes for public Italian Television (Rai); moreover, his involvement in leftwing politics and numerous press columns in Italian and foreign newspapers has led him a career in politics: after his first mandate (1999-2004), he was re-elected, in 2009, as a deputy in the European Parliament.An original interpreter of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo proposes an antifoundational philosophy whose postmetaphysical claims are not an attempt at overcoming (Uberwindung) previous lesser philosophical positions, but at turning them to new 'purposes' (Verwindung), as Richard Rorty has suggested. By prioritizing interpretation over description, Vattimo's weak thinking acknowledges the hermeneutical framework within which contemporary philosophy develops, and thus stands at the heart of postmodernist debate. His best-known works are The End of Modernity; The Transparent Society; The Adventure of Difference; Beyond Interpretation; Religion, co-edited with Jacques Derrida; Belief; After Christianity; Nihilism and Emancipation; The Future of Religion, co-authored with Richard Rorty; Not Being God, an autobiography co-authored with Piergiorgio Paterlini; Dialogue with Nietzsche; The Responsibility of the Philosopher; and Hermeneutic Communism, co-authored with Santiago Zabala.2The interviewer, Gabriel Serbu, is currently a second year Humanities Ph.D. student at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) under the supervision of Professor Santiago Zabala. His work deals with J. M. Coetzee's fiction in the context of philosophical hermeneutics. The interview took place in Turin (Italy) on 13 May 2016 and was translated from Italian by the interviewer.Gabriel Serbu [GS]: What has been the role of philosophical education in Western societies and what does it mean study philosophy?Gianni Vattimo [GV]: Actually, study philosophy is not a natural activity. Philosophy departments, for instance, have only been around since the eighteenth century or so, when the modern university was established. Before that, philosophy was, of course, still taught and studied, but often in very different forms. The study of philosophy as we know it is thus a historically conditioned activity, something that we have learned do within a certain tradition. This involves becoming both familiar with a series of traditional texts (including literary texts such as, for example, Rabelais's The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel) and aware of the history of the development of such a tradition. …