In the second semester of 2024-2025 a group of professors and collaborators will offer a transdisciplinary course in the Alphonsian Academy entitled “La persona umana come essere relazionale. Prospettive transdisciplinari”. The course will be comprised of three parts: 1. Introduction 2. Selected Authors and Texts 3. Five Paradigms (personalist, phenomenological, psychological, sociological and theological). This is the second of a series of posts in which I will examine (in my own name, not in that of the research group) in a preliminary way each of these five paradigms…) II. The Personalist Paradigm In the first post of this series we examined how the meaning of the term “paradigm” has itself undergone significant “shifts”. From being a simple, identifiable pattern (as in a grammatical paradigm) a paradigm has come to refer to something like a comprehensive, prescriptive model for collective living (as in “the technocratic paradigm”). It is clear that such a move is potentially of enormous importance for ethics because it implies the moral evaluation of alternative, competing models of human interaction. In the planned transdisciplinary course, we will be examining five different paradigms of the human person as a relational being. Let us begin by taking an initial look…

In the second semester of 2023-2024 a group of professors and collaborators will offer a transdisciplinary course in the Alphonsian Academy entitled “La persona umana come essere relazionale. Prospettive transdisciplinari”. The course will be comprised of three parts: 1. Introduction; 2. Selected Authors and Texts; 3. Five Paradigms (personalist, phenomenological, psychological, sociological and theological). This is the first of a series of posts in which I will examine (in my own name, not in that of the research group) in a preliminary way each of these five paradigms. This initial post will take a closer look at the very idea of a paradigm, especially in the context of moral-theological discussion. I.  The Term “Paradigm” Shifts Paradigm A good place to begin a study of the term “paradigm” is with amo, amas, amat, or, more precisely, with the structure -o, -as, -at that is discernible in the conjugation of the verb amare in Latin. This structure may be considered a grammatical paradigm because it can serve as a model for the conjugation of similar verbs such as abominare. The least we can say of a paradigm is that it consists in a recognisable structure that can be imitated and repeated with…

Two recent crises have raised the question as to the legitimate use of coercive force: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the first case the coercive force mainly took the form of legal restrictions on various human activities such as work and travel; in the second case, coercive force is being exercised primarily in the form of sanctions and financial support for Ukraine (which makes possible the other kind of coercive force Ukraine is using to expel the invader). In both cases there has been much debate about the ethics of such measures. The purpose of this post is to consider briefly the ethics of the use of coercive force in responding to the ecological and social crisis depicted in Laudato sì. In Chapter 5 of that document there are various discrete but firm references to the need for such force (for example, §§ 167,175,181). This need arises out of the simple fact that when some parties attempt to respond to the crisis by introducing change other parties tend to obstruct this process. It is not realistic to imagine that all parties will freely cooperate in effecting the necessary change. But is it ethically legitimate to…

Last year, dott. Giorgio Del Signore, Bursar of the Alphonsian Academy, prof. Leonardo Salutati and myself launched a research project in the Academy entitled “The Governance of Change – at a time of ecological transition”. We had hoped to organize a summer school on this theme last July, but maybe we should have been more active in seeking participants – some very suitable applications did arrive but they were insufficient in number. Still convinced of the importance of on-going reflection on this matter, with their agreement, I am writing this post to present a new proposal to all interested parties. The idea is to create a kind of sub-blog within the blog of the Alphonsian Academy. The broad theme of the sub-blog remains the governance of change, meaning by this the way in which an appropriate response to the social and ecological crisis depicted in Laudato sì can be effectively organized and managed. This encyclical can be understood as a sort of manifesto regarding this response. The narrower focus of the sub-blog will be on the open ethical questions raised by Laudato sì. These questions need on-going reflection and a constant effort at deeper understanding. While welcoming contributions from all…

Two of the most important words in the Phenomenology of Perception of Merleau-Ponty are “world” (monde) and “meaning” (sens).  This post will not focus on the long analyses that this author offers on each term but rather on the way he understands the relationship between these two terms. In his thought world and meaning are co-relative, almost synonymous: there is no world without meaning and no meaning without the world.             In common usage the term “world” is employed to talk about quite a range of different realities: the planet Earth, the ensemble of all that is, a sector of culture (the world of cinema) and so on. In general, the term has a spatial connotation, that is to say the world is a space in which something is located or in which something happens.  Merleau-Ponty speaks of the naïve conception of the world as being like a big box in which are to be found objects, people, villages, clouds… Understood in this way the world is thought of as something objective, concrete and real. It is a ready-made world, a fait accompli.             From the beginning, phenomenology strongly contested this way of thinking about the world. The main problem…