CERC participates in the new and stimulating Philosophical Laboratory of the Global Age (Labfileglob) that has just been launched by professor Elena Pulcini, one of the members of the steering committee of CERC.
The members of Labfileglob share a strong interest in the study of the problems and issues related to the main transformations occurring with the global age. Even though the Labfileglob members come from different disciplines, they strongly believe that philosophy could and should contribute to analyzing the urgent challenges produced by globalization.
Labfileglob
This is the reason why Labfileglob aims to develop a critical approach, able to connect the current challenges with the analytical and methodological tools provided by social philosophy. According to this perspective, Labfileglob wants to outline possible remedies to these challenges at the ethical, social and political levels, not by referring to abstract normative principles, but by following an immanent critique enabled by the subjects and resources within the social reality.[pullquote]Labfileglob’s activities also include publications in peer-reviewed journals, collective volumes and monographs hosting its members’ research.[/pullquote]
Such an immanent approach requires reflection on the psycho-anthropological structure of individuals starting from their socio-historical living contexts, in order to further investigate the motivations – especially the emotional ones – and the world images at the root of the individual and social agency. This philosophical approach provides a critical diagnosis of the present grounded on a transformative perspective and inspired by world images so as to develop a utopic and post-ideological emancipatory project.
Theoretical framework
Within this theoretical framework, Labfileglob devotes special attention to the following issues and approaches:
- analysis of the global challenges and their ethical, affective and psychological effects on subjectivities;
- critical diagnosis of capitalism as a dynamic form of life that has assumed a global scale, reframing its relationship with politics, nature and society;
- an anthropological theory of democracy, able to explain the changed relationships between politics, violence, power and domination better than the traditional approaches;
- a relational theory of the subject, inspired by some feminist reflections and gender studies, going beyond the opposition between the modern idea of a sovereign subject and the postmodern idea of the implosion of the subject;
- reflection on a set of key concepts – such as vulnerability, interdependence, conflict, care, responsibility, sense, imagination and world image – to outline the possible affective, ethical and political remedies for an emancipatory transformation of the present.
Methodological frame
This methodological frame and this thematic focus entail the following requirements:
- a careful consideration of the most significant classics for a critical diagnosis of the present;
- new focus on as-yet-unexplored or underestimated theoretical perspectives;
- open interdisciplinarity, involving sociology, political science, anthropology and psychoanalysis, neurosciences, literature and cinema;
- a fresh discussion of fundamental concepts of the philosophical theory of modernity in order to verify whether it is obsolete or continues to be valid in the face of the present epochal transformations.
Laboratorio di Filosofia dell’età globale (Labfileglob)
