Graziano Lingua

THE CRISIS OF EXPERTS AND DISINTERMEDIATION. A PERSPECTIVE BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND PEDAGOGY The essay examines the contemporary crisis of experts through the lens of digital disintermediation, showing how the proliferation of information sources, the rhetoric of immediacy, and the rise of AI have undermined the institutional networks that once sustained epistemic legitimacy. This shift destabilizes the traditional “regimes of expertise,” weakening intermediary figures such as teachers, journalists, and communicators, and placing schools and universities under pressure as mediating institutions of knowledge. In education, the crisis intersects with neoliberal and individualistic trends that reduce knowledge to mere utility or self-directed consumption. The essay calls for rebuilding a renewed social pact around expertise and restoring the transformative role of human mediation against the illusion of frictionless, “double-click” knowledge.

Malgré bien des réductions journalistiques, la rationalité économique fondée sur l’idée de l’homo oeconomicus – un individu atome qui maximise son propre intérêt à travers un calcul utilitariste de coûts et de profits – est aujourd’hui l’objet de nombreuses critiques. L’article analyse ainsi deux types de critiques : une critique externe et une critique interne. Les deux soulignent que pour comprendre la rationalité économique, nous avons besoin d’un horizon anthropologique plus vaste, apte à mettre en discussion l’image de l’homme à l’œuvre dans les diverses déclinaisons de l’économie. L’article met alors l’accent sur les recherches de l’anthropologie philosophique portant sur la nature humaine, qui montrent le caractère intrinsèquement relationnel des êtres humains, et peut mettre en discussion l’individualisme méthodologique de l’homo oeconomicus. Finalement, en décrivant la rationalité en termes de rationalité, et en mettant l’accent sur la catégorie de biens relationnels développée par l’approche fondée sur « l’économie sociale », l’article met en avant une façon possible de repenser la rationalité économique.

Those who appeal to humanism today defend a central role for human beings over increasingly alienating technical apparatuses and thus preserve values and ideals that are undermined by the growing role of machines and the marked autonomy that technical objects are acquiring. Simondon had already grasped this aspect when he argued that each era recreates its own humanism in response to the alienating elements that characterise it (Simondon, 2017, 118–121). Even if he does not highlight it, this was already the role played by the humanist instances present in antiquity, starting with the Greek paideia and the Latin humanitas, which were born respectively to counter barbarism with education and to defend a universal ideal of civilisation and the ethical formation of the free citizen. The same immunitarian dynamic was indeed participated in by late antiquity and medieval Christian humanism, which was found in the doctrine of creation “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26), a solid theological reference to safeguard the dignity of the human being and to attribute to him a central role in creation.

Daniele Guastini’s book Immagini cristiane e cultura antica is one of the most significant contributions to the current debate on the role of Christian images. The choice of images made by Christianity since the third century – this is the main thesis of the work – represents one of the generative moments of the long-lasting process of secularization that came to characterize Western culture. This essay aims to discuss this thesis, contextualizing it both from a theological point of view and in relation to its philosophical and cultural-historical significance. I then dwell on two questions more directly related to the interpretation of the Christian image in the first millennium: the relationship that the iconographic practice of the Christian origins has with the Jewish and pagan context, and the role that the interpretation of the “Byzantine turn” plays in the overall structure of the Guastini’s book.

The studies on the history of the notion of “personhood” have largely recognized that Christian thought had a central role in the development and significance of this concept throughout the history of Western civilization. In late antiquity, Christianity used some terms taken from the classic and Hellenistic vocabulary in order to express its own theological content. This operation generated a “crisis” of classical language, namely a semantic transformation in the attempt to address some aspects of reality which were not envisioned by the previous usage of these words. The term person is a paradigmatic example of this process. In fact, from the outset, it played a strategic role in formulating the idea of Incarnation, one of the central doctrines of Christianity. This essay aims to show how, during the first centuries of Christianity, the terms commonly used in order to express the notion of “personhood” became pivotal elements for the formulation of the discourse about the Trinity and progressively acquired new meanings. The analysis focuses only on the initial stage of the elaboration of this concept in Christianity and, based on some of the most significant texts, tries to bring out a series of theoretical problems that may be useful to understand the subsequent debate. In order to do so, the author divides the text in two parts. In the first one, he analyses two features strictly connected to the theological use of the term “persona”, which remained central also when this term was later referred to man. These features are individuality and ontological stability, along with the structurally relational status of personhood. In the second part, the author offers more details about the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, in particular of Basil of Caesarea, and analyses two sectorial languages—mathematical and iconic language—used by Basil in order to describe the intra-trinitarian relationships.

Eschatology is one of the most interesting aspects of the thought of S.N. Bulgakov, not only for the originality, but also for the role it plays in all his intellectual work. His arguments against the eternity of hell and his theory of universal salvation are not optional features of his theology, but they rather represent a test-bed for some theoretical issues that not only cross all of his sophiology, but that were already at the origin of his shift from Marxism to Idealism and, later, to the Orthodox faith. By comparing early Bulgakov’s writings with his late works on Christian eschatology, this paper shows the lines of continuity of his thought, and especially his interest for the role of individual creativity and personal freedom against the tendency of Positivism and Marxism to reduce history to impersonal processes alone. A careful analysis of the whole development in the thought of Bulgakov shows that its soteriological universalism cannot be interpreted as a form of disguised historical determinism, nor does it imply a unilateral act of God that cancels the role of human historical choices. Rather, it emphasizes Bulgakov’s commitment to reconcile the moral inevitability of freedom with an ontological understanding of salvation in which God’s mercy cannot leave anyone out, not even Satan.

This essay aims to compare the genealogies of secularization proposed by Charles Taylor and John Milbank, two of the most relevant interpretations in the contemporary revival of the debate on this issue. It claims to show that they are not simply based on different historical perspectives, but also on divergent theoretical devices. Through a synthetic reconstruction of both this narratives of the secularization process, the author firstly highlights their common conviction that secularization is not the simple result of the dissolution of religion, or the necessary product of modernization, but a contingent phenomenon linked to specific dynamics of Western Christian culture. After this, the paper analyses differences between Taylor’s genealogy, focusing on the category of “reform” as a process of continuous transformation and redefinition of the tradition occurred in Latin Christianity and the Milbank’s genealogy, based on the category of “heresy”, which identifies the remote origin of the secular domain in a precise intellectual detour occurred with the thought of Scotus and Ockham.