Axel Honneth is internationally renowned for being one of the leading political and social philosophers of our time, and is highly regarded for his work on recognition and the struggles for recognition. In this interview, he discusses his work over the past four decades, starting from the rise of his intellectual vocation to his most recent book on the sovereignty of work. The text is a transcript, revised by the author, of the dialogue Honneth had with his interviewers and the audience at the masterclass held on 24 May 2023 at the University of Trento, as part of the first series of lectures “Voices from Contemporary Philosophy”.

The essay analyzes some issues in the philosophical works of Merleau-Ponty and Esposito, in particular focusing on the relationship between temporality, institution and phenomenology.

This paper aims to inspect the political potential of Kant’s grounding of hope and its content breaks down in three parts. First, I give an account of Kant’s approach to right and hope as a rule for our judgments and actions, shedding light over the shift that Kant’s notion of the Highest Good undergoes from a theological framework to a political one, which makes of individuals the main feature of action. Second, I focus on the intergenerational exercise of imagination inasmuch as it foreshadows the material and symbolic needs of the forthcoming generations, highlighting the key role it plays for addressing the political agency of hope. Moreover, I focus on the capacity of this kind of imagination to resist against the devices and (mis-)informative tendencies that lead human imagination to collapse as the headquarters of critical mental activity. Third, I address the epistemic framework that seems more adequate to continue drawing to hope as a promising tool to build up subjects conscious of the shortcomings of the world and the society they are embedded in. Finally, I display some concluding remarks about the interaction between material structures and culture of emotions as a key issue stemming from this enquiry of Kant’s conceptual legacy about hope.

Il saggio propone una lettura del materialismo speculativo di Ernst Bloch interpretandolo come “scienza della speranza”. La filosofia politica di Bloch viene presentata come un pensiero dell’emancipazione determinato da un’antropologia e un’ontologia sviluppate attorno alle categorie di “anticipazione” e di “materia”, entrambe indicizzate dalla logica della “possibilità oggettivo-reale”. Infine, il saggio propone di considerare il contributo filosofico-politico di Bloch come un pensiero marxista aperto a processi di soggettivazione plurale che rappresentano concrete possibilità di emancipazione nel quadro della dimensione globale della formazione sociale capitalistica.

The article explores the living legacy of Carla Lonzi for Italian feminism. In so doing, it highlights some key contributions made by Lonzi, in particular focussing on the necessity of taking leave of patriarchy (thanks to the invention of self-awareness), the critique of the universal (beyond the false alternative between female identity and equality with man), and the dogma of the heterosexual couple and clitoral pleasure.

George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), first US Minister to the Kingdom of Italy, is also known as a father of environmentalism, due to his book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). The book includes environmental changes George witnessed during his New England years and as he and his wife Caroline lived and traveled abroad. Caroline’s diaries written in Italy attest to her partnership in the book’s composition and to its role among their ambassadorial duties.

The article presents political corruption as a problem of public ethics of institutions. It first explains the theory of institutional action that underlies the conception of political corruption as a deficit of “office accountability”. Having clarified the officeholders’ duties in their institutional capacity, it portrays political corruption as an “internal enemy” of public institutions. A discussion follows of the normative implications for an approach to anti-corruption based on the officeholders’ direct engagement.

This paper develops a view of the wrongness of personal political corruption. The latter is wrong even when it has no impact or relations with political institutions. The thought is that instances of personal moral corruption of politicians are wrong to voters because they amount to forcing the latter to be authors, namely responsible, of their representatives’ misdeeds. Political corruption is wrong because it violates citizens’ moral integrity, i.e., their entitlement to abstain from immoral deeds, and to be free of responsibility for them.

This paper questions the claim, advanced persuasively by Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, that political corruption should primarily be understood as a “deficit of office accountability.” On the one hand, it identifies some ambiguities internal to their theory; these suggest that it underestimates the role of self-serving motives in corruption and overemphasizes the perversion of institutional mandates. On the other hand, it describes a form of “passive corruption” that their theory cannot easily accommodate. Passive corruption, I argue, consists in an excess, rather than a deficit, of “office accountability” and typically arises when different institutions come into conflict with each other.

In this contribution I offer an analysis of some specific theses defended by Ceva and Ferretti (2021). First, I raise a question related to the theoretical work done by the sabotage of an institution’s raison d’être when both describing and morally evaluating political corruption. In particular, I will ask whether the ultimate moral reason why corruption is a moral wrong rests on the sabotage of the raison d’être that it entails and to which it could be con-substantially tied. Relatedly, I will explore whether the sabotage of an institution’s raison d’être can be described without that particular cause-effect relationship which is the relationship between action and its consequences, and if the relation holds, whether we can still guarantee the constitutivist account of the moral agent that the authors favor. The second question I pose concerns the deficit of “office accountability” which according to the authors would be at the heart of the moral wrong of which political corruption consists. I will wonder whether this deficit is sufficient to capture political corruption, although it is certainly a necessary manifestation of it. Finally, I will argue that in order to grasp the phenomenon of political corruption not only should we look at intra-institutional relations, but also at the inter-institutional ones. A succinct appendix on the common sense semantics of the adjective “corrupt” completes my commentary.