ABSTRACT: FROM LIVING BEINGS TO FORMS OF LIFE. GEORGES CANGUILHEM AND THE CRITIQUE OF OBJECTIVITY This article reconstructs Canguilhem's critique of the objectivity of science and develops its conceptual genealogy and implications. If objectivity depends on the positioning of a norm constantly in excess of factual conditions, how can we understand the norm's relationship to the intrinsic normativity of liv ing beings? Is it possible to think of it as a transcendental factuality whose name would be “life".
One of the central challenges for modern democracies is enabling citizens with divergent preferences to reach shared decisions. Unlike voting or negotiation, deliberation encourages participants to revise their initial positions through rational dialogue aimed at identifying the most just or well-founded choice. However, deliberation should not be understood merely as an expression of personal honesty or coherence, but as a collective search for the best possible decision through reasoned exchange. While coherence and honesty are valuable, treating them as ultimate goals distorts deliberative democracy, shifting it from a decision-oriented process toward a person-centered one focused on interpersonal respect.
The essay examines the contemporary crisis of experts through the lens of digital disintermediation, showing how the proliferation of information sources, the rhetoric of immediacy, and the rise of AI have undermined the institutional networks that once sustained epistemic legitimacy. This shift destabilizes the traditional "regimes of expertise," weakening intermediary figures such as teachers, journalists, and communicators, and placing schools and universities under pressure as mediating institutions of knowledge. In education, the crisis intersects with neoliberal and individualistic trends that reduce knowledge to mere utility or self-directed consumption. The essay calls for rebuilding a renewed social pact around expertise and restoring the transformative role of human mediation against the illusion of frictionless, "double-click" knowledge.
This essay explores the transformation of the human condition within what we can define as the Digiticene: an onto-technological epoch in which human existence and digital systems co-evolve. Moving beyond the Anthropocene, the Digiticene marks the emergence of the InfoSapiens, a being whose cognition, identity, and memory are continuously reshaped by informational environments and algorithmic mediations. This essay examine how this new ecology-articulated through the interconnected notions of InfoSphere, OnLife, and SmartEcoSystem-redefines the human as an extended and distributed entity, embedded in networks of symbolic and computational exchanges. Within these EcoSystems, every interaction becomes a cognitive act, every interface a site of meaning production, and every data flow a gesture of self-construction. The traditional categories of truth, causality, and knowledge are thus reconfigured within a dynamic regime grounded in correlations, predictive models, and performative simulations. The InfoSapiens inhabits a space of continuous negotiation between the algorithmic and the indeterminate, between machinic precision and human ambiguity. This anatomy aims not only to describe but also to diagnose: to trace the evolving contours of an ontological condition in which the human learns to dwell lightly within the informational ecologies it has generated.
The aim of this article is to reconstruct the genealogy of plants, highlighting their status as decorative environment - as discussed in the treatment of the Plane Tree in Phaedrus. Starting from a conservative view of plants, the article will explore the differences between plants and humans, attempting to show their specificity, possible relationships, and a non-hierarchical interpretation of their relationship. The main question is the same as the one found in The position of man in the cosmos: Does the essence of plants exhaust itself in the function of nourishment? In We are notyet saved, Sloterdijkredefines the human being as the only entity capable of leaving its environment, establishing an ontological difference between it and the world. In Nietzsche, Jaspers precisely highlights the concept of the will to power as the being of the entity, meaning the totality of what lives. Nietzsche grants plants the ability to act as a container of will, to expand - though in a limited way. The article will explore the difference between the conservation proposed by Scheler and the tendency toward fulfillment proposed by Nietzsche... Finally, the proposals of Ortega and Zambrano will be analyzed, aiming to investigate the status of plants, particularly the forest, as a transcendent opening. This approach is justified by the desire to view theories about plants from multiple perspectives.
Ernst E. Haeckel, renowned as the father of ecology, revolutionized the life sciences with his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), a work aimed to address the philosophical foundations of life. Among his contributions, Haeckel's philosophical inquiry into chorology-the comprehensive science of the spatial distribution of organisms-has remained unexplored. This article investigates the interconnectedness of life and space as explained by Haeckel through his synthesis of morphology, ecology, and chorology. Influenced by Goethe's concepts of morphology and metamorphosis and Lamarck's transformism, Haeckel identified in Darwin's theory of natural selection the efficient cause of the becoming of organisms'forms. However, what allowed organisms and species to acquire theirfirstform and come into existence remained unknown. Haeckel found this in the Platonic concept of ch & oacute;ra-the generative space that pre-existed all living forms. Since every organism must possess both a form and a place in order to exist, ch & oacute;ra represented, for Haeckel, the ultimate cause of all living things. At the same time, Haeckel transformed the Plato's ch & oacute;ra by introducing a morphogenetic dimension: space was no longer a passive receptacle but a dynamic, living, and relational field. By integrating morphology, ecology, and chorology, Haeckel laid the groundwork for an interconnected understanding of life and its evolution across Earth's ever-changing regions. For this reason, I argue that what we owe to Haeckel is not merely ecology but the establishment of the philosophical foundations of life.
& Eacute;tienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), a French physiologist, is especially known for his experiments and discoveries on animal locomotion through the use of photography. The extraordinary results he achieved in representing closely sequenced movements earned him a place within the ambiguous and crowded category of "pre-cinema", but this has partly obscured the distinctive nature of his scientific path. This paper aims to trace, within this rich trajectory, some key turning points, particularly those related to the expansion of the possibilities of experimental physiology, to the methods and spaces of experimentation and discovery, and especially to the open-air spaces of observation and photography of nature & laquo;in its own domain [dans son propre domaine]& raquo;.
The article examines the relationship between experts and the university in light of the epistemic crisis that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. After reconstructing the historical foundations of the university-as an institution devoted to the production of knowledge, the validation of expertise, the universality of learning, and academic freedom-the essay shows how a long-term transformation, from early modern specialization to contemporary professionalization, has progressively eroded the university's capacity to cultivate critical thinking. The pandemic made this fragility particularly visible: the exposure of experts in the media sphere, the blurring of roles, and the proliferation of pseudo-experts weakened both the self-understanding of academics and the public's ability to recognize epistemic authority. From this diagnosis emerges the "fourth night of the university": the social non-recognition of knowledge, fueled by relativism, anti-intellectualism, and a growing distrust of epistemic institutions. The article concludes by outlining possible paths of renewal, advocating a recovery of the university's original triptych-production and validation of expertise, universality of knowledge, and academic freedom-and the reintroduction of shared formative tools such as logic, argumentation, and writing, which are essential for enabling citizens to navigate contemporary hyper-knowledge societies. Only by returning to the formation of autonomous thinkers and to the pursuit of truthm can the university emerge from its current night.
The idea that intelligence can be reduced to a single and stable meaning has long shaped philosophical reflection, but today it appears increasingly inadequate. Speaking of intelligence means questioning not only human cognitive abilities, but also the ways in which knowledge, rationality and consciousness have been understood throughout history. This essay traces a number of key moments in the Western philosophical tradition from the Greeks to medieval thought, through modern philosophy and twentieth-century debates in order to show how the concept of intelligence has been repeatedly redefined. The aim is not to propose a final definition, but to reconstruct the genealogy of these transformations and to understand how, in the contemporary context, intelligence can also be attributed to artificial systems. In this perspective, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence does not simply add a new chapter to an already long story: it invites us to rethink what we mean by "intelligence" and, consequently, what it means to call ourselves human. Rather than opposing human and artificial intelligence, the article suggests that we should examine how technological forms of cognition reshape our self-understanding and our relationship with the world.
This paper addresses the ongoing crisis of expertise in the digital age by analysing the growing, but often misplaced, trust in generative technologies such as large language models (LLMs). While rhetorically persuasive, these systems simulate coherence without ensuring epistemic validity, displacing traditional forms of expert mediation. Based on a relational theory of expertise and a digital humanist framework, this paper calls for a renewed understanding of competence and trust grounded in situated, ethical, and cultural practises. The paper unfolds in seven sections. It begins by reconstructing the limits of traditional models of expertise, then explores how digital technologies have emerged as apparent alternatives to expert mediation. A historical and conceptual analysis follows, showing how platforms and LLMs gained epistemic authority. The central sections critically assess the logic of LLMs and the misplaced trust they generate. The final part proposes a renewed, relational model of expertise grounded in a digital humanist ethos.
The pandemic has left a deep mark on our social relationships. It is now necessary to identify these micro-traumas that have affected our communicative and relational practices. In particular, it is useful to focus our attention on three aspects of our daily lives that have undergone sudden and profound changes: the presumed disintermediation as an opportunity, the explosion of immersive remote communication in virtual environments, and the urgency of indicators of "authority/credibility" in information sources. All of this reopens, in a new light, the eternal dilemma of the "orientation" of social action.
This article proposes a pragmatist reassessment of the relationship between technology and expert knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence, highlighting the limits of the analytical paradigm and the potential of a "weak syntheticity" based on actions carried out in collaboration with AI. Through the case study of the Pandemic Museum, it explores a model of communicative re-intermediation in which AI acts as a co-participant in the construction of knowledge, fostering dialogic forms of experience and trust. The final hypothesis applies this model to the healthcare field, introducing an interactive and participatory "medical agent" that implies a different communicative approach, and a different possible solution, to the crisis of expertise.
This article examines Bruno de Finetti's 1952 publication Machines That Think (and Make You Think) (original Italian: Macchine che pensano (e che fanno pensare)) as a foundational text in the early reception and dissemination of ideas related to artificial intelligence (AI) in Italy. Based on his 1950 study tour of U.S. computing centers, de Finetti's reportage combines firsthand observation of early digital calculators with critical reflections on cybernetics, memory systems, and the conceptual boundaries of thought. Positioned between technical report and philosophical essay, the text offers a unique mediation of emerging computational paradigms for an Italian scientific audience. By contextualizing this work alongside parallel developments by Silvio Ceccato, Louis Couffignal, and Norbert Wiener, the article argues for its significance in the broader European intellectual history of AI. It highlights de Finetti's role as a cultural broker and underscores the cross-cultural nature of AI's early history-a narrative often dominated by U.S. and British developments.
This contribution introduces Issue 34 of SCIENZAEFILOSOFIA as a moment of renewal within the continuity of an editorial project active since 2009, originally conceived to critically examine the transformations brought about by the biomedical revolution, emerging technologies, and the digital medium. In light of the profound changes that have marked recentyears - from the Covid-19 pandemic to the widespread diffusion ofgenerative artificial intelligence and the crisis of Western democracies - the issue inaugurates a renewed graphic design, a reorganization of its sections, and an updated citation system. These changes signal not a rupture with the past, buta reflective and non-passive rethinking of the journal's role within the contemporary cultural landscape. The volume also hosts a Special Issue devoted to the crisis of expertise in the age of the digital revolution, alongside a "Contributions" section featuring essays on artificial intelligence, ecology, neuroscience, art, and public deliberation, thus offering an interdisciplinary perspective on some of the most pressing theoretical and ethical challenges of the present. The issue is completed by five book reviews, further confirming the journal's commitment to engaging with key debates in contemporary philosophy and science
This proposal is based on the three Cs: consciousness, corporeality and capabilities are the three essential Cs for ethics to transcend the mere "functioning" of technologies. The concept of awareness isfundamental to our thinking. We see it in Paul Ricoeur's portrayal of Oedipus at Colonus and in Philip Kitcher's notions about valuational progress. Taking into account the crisis of expertise and its genuine quest for efficiency, we will explore why and how this awareness is essential at the fundamental level of social interaction. A fictional episode from the famous television series Black Mirror, as well as the spread of fem-tech and recent AI medical devices, help us understand the ethical issues at stake.
This article reassesses the viability of free will in light of contemporary neuroscience, arguing for a compatibilist model grounded in neurobiological determinism. Rejecting libertarian accounts, itreframesfree will as a functional capacity within causal processes, drawing on the identificationist tradition, the reason-responsiveness model, and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities(PAP). Empirical decision-making models, such as conditional intention and integration to bound (COINTOB), together with Jesse Prinz's Attended Intermediate-level Representations theory (AIRs), support the causal role of conscious deliberation. Free will is thus conceived as a scalable capacity embedded in the deterministic structure of cognition.
This article explores the philosophical and communicative dimensions of diagnosis disclosure between physicians and patients. Using the Italian healthcare system legal framework and its ongoing challenges in fostering ethical communication practices as a starting point, it continues the ongoing philosophical discussion about this interaction, considering it more than a clinical task and a profound moment of existential and narrative transformation for the patient. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from hermeneutics, narrative identity, and ethics of care, the article utilizes the well-known asymmetry of knowledge and authority between doctor and patient to emphasize the importance of treating diagnosis disclosure as a dialogical process rather than a top-down delivery of information. In analysing possible solutions to this problem without overburdening the medical worker with additional training, the article proposes the possibility of a split between the actual physician and the diagnosis communicator.
The contribution aims at reflecting on the key-role played by science communication in the nowadays media ecosystem and in the public space. As the most recent empirical studies on the connections between science and communication seem to reveal, there is an urgent need of a synergic and integrated approach with a broader collaboration among all the social actors involved to explore such a complex and dynamic landscape; it is necessary, in order to face those challenges, social and cultural changes, that are emerging in a redefined communicative and media environment. The characteristics of the contemporary communication panorama, if on the one hand they highlight great opportunities and advantages for science in terms of accessibility, democracy and wider audience involvement, on the other hand they show limits, critical issues, fragility. Above all they pose new challenges and greater responsibilities to academic and research institutions, to researchers and scientists, today increasingly active in communicating with citizens; to scientific journalism, the main form of mediation of scientific knowledge. In this "triangulation" between scientific and research institutions, journalistic mediation and the public, we can glimpse a possible path to "renew" the sources of legitimation and social accountability of experts. The reflections here proposed are based on two different sides of the empirical research: on the first one, the scientific institutions and in particular the Universities are always more focused on their communicative goals and activities as one of their institutional and third mission aims. On the second one, scientific journalism seems to offer a meaningful "point of view" to better understand the agenda building processes on scientific issues and their social representations. The contribution addresses these aspects by analyzing both what we have defined as the "communicative dynamism" of the Italian universities, and the contents of the press releases carried out between 2019 and 2024 by ANSA in 3 issues: environment, health, science and technology.
This paper argues that a dialogue between biosemiotics and Giorgio Agamben's philosophy can be philosophically fruitful and illustrates this through a biosemiotic extension of Agamben's experimentum linguae. It emphasizes that both Agamben's philosophical project and the field of biosemiotics converge in their critical reflection on the relation between language and life, and in a shared-though differently formulated-effort to theorize biological life as inherently meaningful. I suggest that biosemiotics can offer a scientific grounding for Agamben's philosophy of language while also benefiting from a philosophical deepening of its conceptual implications, especially in relation to contemporary questions of politics and ethics. However, the radical nature of Agamben's philosophy of impotentiality and suspension might obstruct this dialogue. To develop their convergence and address this obstacle, I offer an interpretation of Agamben's work that underlines the influence of non-biosemiotics modes of thought on his thinking, specifically his understanding of language. Since this influence is not neutral but specific and contingent, it opens up the opportunity to replace it with a biosemiotic alternative. I then introduce and elaborate the idea of an experimentum semioseos: an experience of semiosis as such, understood via biosemiotics as spanning both human and non-human forms of life. I argue that the long-term observation of vegetative life-particularly plants-plays a central role in making this experience possible
This article explores Jean-Fran & ccedil;ois Lyotard's reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime, positioning it as a central element in his philosophical reflection on the limits of representation, the experience of injustice, and the silent resistance of thought. Starting from Kant's Critique of Judgment, the author reconstructs the trajectory that led the sublime from its aesthetic and rhetorical origins to its transcendental reconfiguration, emphasizing how Kant reoriented the concept toward the subjective faculties of feeling and judgment. Lyotard's appropriation of the sublime is then contextualized within broader debates about postmodernity, the crisis of grand narratives, and the fragmentation of discursive regimes. The sublime, in Lyotard's view, emerges as a crucial modality of aesthetic and ethical awareness, capable of bearing witness to the "wrong" (tort) that remains unspeakable within hegemonic discourses. Drawing on key Lyotardian texts such as Le diff & eacute;rend and Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, the essay argues that the sublime's dissonance, its resistance to representation, and its gestural reference to the unpresentable, constitute a vital gesture of philosophical testimony. The article ultimately frames Lyotard's reading of Kant not as a mere stylistic exercise, but as a profound attempt to reconfigure the role of feeling in critical thought, where the silent force of the sublime becomes a way to sense the fracture between justice and discourse, presence and absence, thought and existence.
