Expert Meeting of the Research Project: "Rediscovering the individual. An inquiry into a reshaped metaphysics"
Setting the method, building up a lexicon
The historical method of inquiry is important but does not exempt the scholar from metaphysical commitment; on the contrary, it binds him more so, because it is able to provide a picture of philosophical options that is unprecedented in terms of precision and accuracy and thus provides ideal conditions for the search for truth.
This will be achieved through a combination of historical investigation and metaphysical analysis.The metaphysical analysis: the notion of the individual offers the possibility of a deep metaphysical investigation, grounded on a matching attitude between ancient and medieval traditions and new metaphysical perspectives.
The promotion of an interdisciplinary attitude. The notion of the individual constitutes a as a carrefour that cannot be fully understood without it being measured by the major challenges that come from several disciplines: medical and biological research, law, theology, digital sciences. The most recent and leading metaphysical perspectives could be framed mostly within the tradition of “Analytic Philosophy”, the latter being at its turn born with strong reference to the large project of reform of metaphysics in accordance to the scientific thought that was the main legacy of Modern Philosophy (XVII-XIX Centuries). Contemporary Analytic Metaphysics seems to be a good candidate for an updated discussion of the Modern presuppositions in order to elaborate new questions and to provide new answers.
This assumption should be discussed in the framework of an interdisciplinary work, as proposed in this project, in which both a rigorized version of classical metaphysical thought and the antithetical rigorized version of the modern (and Contemporary) anti-metaphysical thought, should be put in comparison and in challenge in order to evaluate which way leads to the most consistent answer to the contemporary ethical, technological and juridical questions arose in different research fields. This being the general setting of our interdisciplinary approach, we indicate the following disciplines and their interrelations:
- Reflection on method and "logic" of Metaphysics and Science will lead to extracting the structural instances of the issues represented by the approach to the notion of the individual characterizing the other involved disciplines.
- In this sense, the strictly metaphysical aspects related to and implied in the formal and quantitative approach to the description and understanding of the individual and its biological, physical, intellectual and relational capacities, will also be investigated.
- Historical and systematic research in metaphysics should be oriented and hybridized by contact with questions and issues emerging from areas such as the legal definition of the individual and its characterization as a subject of rights, with openness to considering "new rights" and their potential ethical-anthropological background (i.e. relational, classic naturalistic, pragmatic-functional...).
- Ethical and ethico-legal reflection will be related and compared to both substantialist and non-substantialist conceptions of the individual, investigating the reasons for the now classic and misleading split between these two dimensions (ethical and ontological) that should be instead unified.
- In turn, reflection on the impact of technologies and, in general, on the agenda guiding the most advanced technological researches in sectors such as robotics, artificial intelligence and biomedical field must enter into dialogue with proposals and issues developed in metaphysical and legal contexts.
