31/08/2023

Reason and Rationality. Lecture Series

The lectures are integrated into the teaching and research activities of the Joint-PhD in “History and Forms of Transcendental Philosophy”, established in 2019 between the post-graduate programme in philosophy of the PUCPR and the Department of Human Sciences of the University of Ferrara. The series of lectures aims to explore and discuss critically the notion of Reason in modern and contemporary philosophy. Since the very begin of the philosophical attitude, reason has been considered as qualifying human deeds. Hence Aristotle characterised mankind as rational as such. With the developing of the logical thinking reason has been increasingly considered the human ability of drawing inferences operating with syllogisms. In this form we still find reason defined by Kant, who, nonetheless speaks also of a practical reason, paving the way for the use of reason for setting the means for attaining certain goals. Weber took on this idea – leaving aside the second Kantian function of practical reason: the imposition of the categorical imperative – hence bringing the definition of rationality, from the field of morality into the field of the social sciences. Today the philosophy of rationality deals mostly with the epistemic foundation of sociology and economics first and foremost thanks to the establishing of the Rational Choice Theory. Nonetheless, some presuppositions of the RCT are now strongly questioned by the psychological research of Tversky and Tenneman aiming at demonstrating that human beings chose according to a wide range of influences which can hardly be defined rational. This could open a new space for considering that part of the Kantian definition of practical reason, mostly taken up by Fichte and Hegel. Indeed, already Horheimer and Adorno plead for a return of the Hegelian sense of the reason against the mere consideration of the in its instrumental function. These global classes will address the different meaning of reason and rationality in the history of philosophy trying to establish a fruitful dialog among the various traditions which make use of this term. Participants: Francesco Di Iorio (Nankai University, Tianjin, China); Agemir Bavaresco (PUCRS – Porto Alegre); Federico Ferraguto (PUCPR – CuritibaCnpq); Polyana Tidre (UFPR – Curitiba);  Matteo Dalfonso (UNIFE – Ferrara); Luis Felipe Garcia (UCL – Louvain); Paul Dumouchel Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan); Karl-Dieter OPP (University of Leipzig); Giovanni Leghissa (Universty of Turin)