Piergiorgio Donatelli

Wittgenstein and Cavell show that the ordinary is not reducible to social conventions but is rooted in the vertical dimension of forms of life, revealed in the most common and apparently manifest gestures and expressions. Cavell’s reading of Fred Astaire’s dance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon offers a vivid example: against a political backdrop, the routine discloses a future that may be barred yet emerges as an internal possibility. Inheriting and criticizing culture here occur in the motions and expressions of the body, revealed as a space where acknowledgement and transformation are possible, even if only as a momentary achievement. Such criticism arises from within, responding to what is missed or concealed in shared life and seeking untaken possibilities embedded in it.

Artificial Intelligence, democracy and humanistic values The article examines various aspects of the technological turn brought about by artificial intelligence from the perspective of the goals that inspire humanistic and democratic ideals. The new technologies directly effect the humanistic ideal that represents individuals as progressive beings whose self realization requires mutual education (J.S. Mill). Cognitive technologies offer extraordinary tools that advance research and intervention capabilities, but the way in which they are spreading also shows their potential for levelling and the tendency towards passivity. Education is a crucial key notion that needs to be introduced into the discussion.

This special issue on Forms of Life was conceived on the top floor of a café overlooking one of Rome's wonderful Piazzas, after a conference, hosted by Piergiorgio Donatelli, on Forms of Life and Ways of Living. Piergiorgio, Sandra Laugier and I thought the subject cried out for a small collection of essays in which several voices would elucidate the genesis, use and potential of Wittgenstein's concept of form of life -- and we committed to producing it. This is the fruit of our Roman resolution. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock

The notion of forms of life points to a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach that challenges an influential line in the philosophical tradition. He portrays intellectual activities in terms of a cohesion of things held together in linguistic scenes rooted in the lives of people and the facts of the world. The original inspiration with which Wittgenstein worked on this approach is still relevant today in the recent technological turn associated with AI. He attacked a conception that treated human activities as material to be examined by external models of rationality. Along with other modernists such as Musil, he saw the danger of losing faith in human intellectual and moral capacities. In contrast, Wittgenstein elucidates and substantively defends an idea of forms of life in which the great normative enterprises, from science to the works of the imagination, are based on our individual capacity to take the next step from a normative authority that rests entirely with us, as agents who can claim it in the name of others, in the name of arithmetic, in the name of our native language, in the name of justice, and so on. Forms of life are the place to look to claim this authority over the mistrust we feel compelled to cultivate in our human endeavors.

This chapter delves into scenes of disaster as crucial sites to explore the role of forms of life and the ordinary. The habitual and ordinary have the power to bring life together when a form of life breaks down. However the ordinary is constantly at play in our lives allowing for what we perceive as autonomous agents to make choices. The theory of anthropologist Veena DasDas, Veena is specifically examined in this chapter for the important lessons she reveals from the philosophical tradition of Wittgenstein and Stanley CavellCavell, Stanley. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of shifting attention to the network of interdependencies that gives life to the great values of democratic societies and especially to the invisible work of care lavished by many invisible people. This lesson has not been learned.

Je pose une question concernant la place du Tractatus de Wittgenstein dans la tradition éthique. Le Tractatus et la tradition éthique Les remarques que je ferai sont à considérer dans le contexte d'une interprétation du Tractatus qui a été qualifiée de lecture résolue de cette œuvre, ainsi que de la philosophie de Wittgenstein en général Comme l'a écrit Cora Diamond, le Tractatus travaille sur la libération des besoins et des désirs philosophiques, une libération de la philosophie effectuée avec des outils philosophiques : la situation du Tractatus est similaire à celle évoquée dans les Recherches et dans l'œuvre ultérieure, qui se consacre également au projet de se libérer de la philosophie pour le bien de la philosophie.

This book centres on the notion of human life that lies at the foundation of contemporary thinking in the areas of ethics, law and politics. Centrally, the book addresses the deep divide, characteristic of this thinking, between: on the one hand, those who wish to do away with any anthropological understandings of the human, and appeal to mere facts delivered by science; and, on the other hand, critics who defend an anthropological understanding of human life that is tied to traditional, teleological, metaphysics. In short: knowledge of the world is given over to the sciences and moral theory is considered to operate in a distinct, and insulated, domain. But this opposition has, Piergiorgio Donatelli argues here, outlived its usefulness. Through a discussion of the intimate human spheres of reproduction, dying and sexuality, he argues that we now live in a world characterized by new ways of living: by novel rearrangements of emotions, and by the modification, and in some cases a radical rupture in, existing ideas of human life. These shifts challenge any established separation between facts and norms, between human life and its conceptualization. As such, it is argued here, they simultaneously offer the possibility of a new, socially articulated, understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and normativity. Engaging pressing contemporary themes, this book will be invaluable to scholars in the fields of ethics, law and political theory, and both analytic and continental philosophy.

J. S. Mill lays great emphasis on the importance of the notion of the individual as a progressive being. The idea that we need to conceive the self as an object of cultivation and perfection runs through Mill’s writings on various topics, and has played a certain role in recent interpretations. In this paper I propose a specific interpretation of Mill’s understanding of the self, along the lines of what Stanley Cavell identifies as a “perfectionist” concern for the self. Various texts by Mill, ranging from the Logic to On Liberty, show an understanding of the self in which both the theoretical and the practical domain are presented as being internally connected to the transformation of the self. Mill elaborates a criticism of a notion of truth articulated by doctrines having a life independent of the self, as well as a notion of choice which is not the expression of one’s inner self. This internal relation of truth and choice to the self generates a special dialectic within the self, which Mill explores in On Liberty’s second and third chapters by means of several contrasts, such as passive vs. active knowledge, living vs. dead beliefs, or being oneself vs. liking and choosing in crowds.