Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2023) XXV/1

Focus. Un'idea di cosmopolitismo nel pensiero di Hannah Arendt (?) - Symposium I. Tommaso Greco, "La legge della fiducia. Alle radici del diritto", Laterza, Roma-Bari 2021 - Symposium II. Francesco Toto, L’origine e la storia. Il Discorso sull’ineguaglianza di Rousseau, ETS Pisa 2020 - Symposium III. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, We Have Always Been Cyborgs, Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism, Bristol University Press, Bristol 2021 - Varia

In the preface to the Theological Political Treatise Spinoza presents uncertainty as an intractable problem in political and social life. Scholars have indirectly examined uncertainty’s role in TTP, focusing on fear, hope, and superstition. This article takes a comprehensive view of the multiple parts of uncertainty, ultimately showing uncertainty to be both a problem and a source of social vitality. It argues that Spinoza’s central means of addressing destructive forms of uncertainty is through the advancement of what I call constructive forms of uncertainty. Instead of recognizing only the potential dangers and pitfalls accompanying uncertainty, this paper argues that uncertainty can constructively support political stability and a free state. This interpretation presents a fresh reading of the role of uncertainty in the TTP and points toward Spinoza’s abiding concern with uncertainty throughout his oeuvre.

The immunity/community plexus has found an extraordinary and tragic bench test in the recent years of the pandemic. The idea that the community can only survive if it activates a problematic dispositive of immunisation touches, in these years more than ever, the question of democracy. The latter struggles between identity as immediacy and representation as transcendence. Roberto Esposito has tried to envisage a mediation between these two principles by means of the idea of ‘institution’, which serves to counter the furious identification of all in one. But does this idea of immanence and horizontality not risk evoking other forms of spontaneous morphogenesis of political-legal orders? Doesn’t the critique of sovereignty end up resolving itself in the vitalistic exaltation of the unbridledness of those powers that underlie it? Does the institution succeed in standing between these two perspectives (Weberian formalism and Foucauldian biopolitics)?

Is the Hobbesian state of nature a valid paradigm for international relations between states? Starting from the territory of ICT ((Information and Communication Technologies), this paper explores some issues related to cyberwar and cyberspace and their implications for international relations. My conclusion is that there are good reasons to be sceptical about the very existence of international law, just because this explanatory paradigm should also apply to this area.

The article proposes an interpretation of the notion of familiarity through a cross-reading of the mode of philosophical enquiry in Bergson and Heidegger. The argument builds on two examples of short-circuited metaphors. The first metaphor, that of Bergson's swimmer, is structurally flawed, and for this very reason allows one to think of the impossibility of the passage from land to water. The second, that of the fish on dry land by Heidegger, appears in an unexpected place, namely precisely where Heidegger ontologically separates the human being from the animal. The need to think about the mode of questioning is shared by the two authors and is fruitful in identifying the difference between the adventure of philosophy and an adventurous philosophy. The figure of the Charlot, as Jankélévitch renders it, accompanies the investigation of the quelque part, which does not resolve itself in the identification of a spatial elsewhere, but rather in a reflection on interiority that does not leave temporality unscathed.