This article moves from deconstruction to reconstruction in epistemology and research methodology. To begin with, we show why many social scientists are mistaken in their hope to obtain warranted knowledge in practical matters through standard social scientific methodologies. We do so by subjecting two versions of the belief in traditional epistemological projects to critical scrutiny. First, we discuss Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which for centuries provided the most developed epistemological approach. Second, we critically reflect upon the “unity of science” (...) position by showing how a series of more recent epistemological debates in mathematics and logic have ended in impasse. Having revisited Kant’s critical epistemology and other attempts to set knowledge on secure foundations, in section two we argue that the time has come for a pragmatic turn. In sections three and four we suggest that a coherent pragmatic approach consists of two elements: the recognition of knowledge generation as a social and discursive praxis, and the recognition that research should be oriented towards the generation of useful knowledge. We provide a number of concrete suggestions for abduction as a pragmatic research strategy, and we deflect predictable anxieties that our ideas imply an end to the scientific search for sound and solid knowledge. (shrink)

Starting with a definition of political modernity from the angle of its greatest trial, namely totalitarianism, this study pursues two questions: How to conceptualize community after the experience of totalitarianism? And, what can the Eastern Orthodox intellectual tradition contribute to this debate? In both parts of Europe, totalitarianism raised the same political philosophical challenge: How to conceptualize the relationship between the individual and community in the light of the absolute communization of society and the simultaneous absolute atomization of individuals which (...) totalitarianism had brought about? In contemporary Western political philosophy, the reflection upon this experience has taken three principled directions: the unequivocal embrace and conceptual elaboration of liberalism for which the works of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas are exemplary, the communitarian critique of liberalism for which the works of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre are representative, and the postmodern critique which, most clearly expressed in the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, ties the question of community back to the singular human being. In the present study, I add to these three approaches a viewpoint which challenges the limits of all of them. Focusing on the works of Sergej Horužij and Christos Yannaras, I demonstrate how these authors, while accepting the lesson of totalitarianism, seek foundations for their conceptualization of community and human subjectivity in the spiritual and intellectual tradition of Eastern Christianity. My aim is to re-think the political problematic of modernity from the East and beyond liberal, communitarian and postmodern political philosophy in order to extend the interpretative space of political modernity, to sharpen the problematic of community and the human subject after the experience of totalitarianism, and to single out those elements which are especially pertinent for a post-totalitarian philosophy of community: the quality of freedom, the role of practices, and the meaning of tradition. (shrink)

What is the importance of the perspective “from which” war is seen and studied? what consequences derive from its changing (e.g. thanks to legal rules and social institutions)?. The perspective question can be instantiated by the modern dichotomy state of nature-civil society, and beyond war it is extensible to related concepts like “security”. When war is conceived as the authentic ontology of States’ relations, peace is an “empty” space incapable to offer any standpoint. The last decades developments show the “new” (...) capability of a “peace standpoint”, a greatly institutionalised normative dimension offering different meaning to the common space. Once achieved this point of view, not only war ceases to structure an ontological dimension, but it can hardly be appealed to for its alternative “constructive” (or re-shaping) function in the era of terrorism and nuclear menace. (shrink)

This article focuses on some very “fundamental threats” to future generations’ leaving, and considers whether most essential interests of future persons not to be harmed can be construed as rights, and in particular as human rights, as much as present persons’. The framework refers essentially to a conceptual grammar of justice. Moreover, it is suggested to articulate rights through the lens of “disposability” and “non-disposability” principles. Finally, the article shows the reasons for separating what we owe to future persons under (...) the challenge of those threats for humanity, i.e. a matter of justice, from our right to hand down our cultural heritage, and eventually from paternalistic imposition upon future generations of our irreversible choices (even eu-genetic pre-design of future persons identity). (shrink)