Reason and feeling: the fragile balance of ethics

CYCLE: Reasons and Passions. From classical Greece to neuroscience
SPEAKER: Mario De Caro
DATE: Thursday 9 October, 6 pm

According to a millennia-old philosophical tradition, human reason would know how it would be right to behave; unfortunately, however, emotions and passions continually interfere, and often lead us to act in morally inappropriate ways. This is the Plato-Kant line. According to another tradition, the primacy of reason, on the other hand, is a myth to be debunked because morality rather descends from passions and emotions and reason is little more than a frill. This is the Hume-Nietzsche line. The contrast between these two classical traditions continues to this day. However, there is also an alternative tradition, long a minority, which in recent years has been strongly revived at the border between philosophy and psychology. According to this tradition, the solution lies in the middle: a proper integration of rational and emotional factors is indispensable to produce harmonious morality. This is the Aristotle-Dewey line. Who is right?

Mario De Caro is full professor of Moral Philosophy at Roma Tre and Visiting professor at Tufts University in Boston. A former Fulbright fellow at Harvard and Visiting scholar at MIT, he is president of the Italian Society of Moral Philosophy. He has taught courses and lectured at more than one hundred universities in nineteen countries and published seven books and more than two hundred scholarly articles in six languages. He works on moral philosophy, metaphysics, film philosophy, AI ethics and the history of early modern philosophy. He collaborates with La Stampa

Free admission subject to availability.

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