Filosofia pratica e sfera pubblica

With this book, Alberto Pirni undertakes to introduce Italian readers to the work of a number of contemporary English‐ and German‐language political philosophers, for the most part little known in Italy. This task is performed with admirable precision and economy. For those already familiar with these figures, however, Pirni's secondary concern to criticize and synthesize their different positions will be of greater interest. In this regard, Pirni focuses particularly on the ‘rehabilitation’ of autonomous philosophical criticism of the political and on the function of such criticism in the extra‐institutional ‘public sphere’. His basic claim is that Onora O'Neill's Kantian constructivism offers an attractive combination of the ‘universalist’, represented by Otfried Höffe's Kantianism, and the ‘particularist’, represented by Clifford Geertz's anthropology, but that Kantian constructivism marginalizes significant ‘anthropological’ particularities, and must therefore be incorporated into the hermeneutical perspective that Charles Taylor develops from the work of Hans‐Georg Gadamer. The book begins with two chapters concerning, respectively, the theories of Höffe and Geertz. Pirni describes the development, from Politische Gerechtigkeit of 1987 to Kategorische Rechtsprinzipien of 1990 and the essays of the mid‐1990s, of Höffe's contract theory of a ‘transcendental exchange’ of fundamental rights, those ‘transcendental interests’ whose satisfaction is necessary for the pursuit of further particular interests. Pirni emphasizes certain ambiguities in Höffe's consequent normative theory of the ‘world republic’ which follow from the treatment of member states themselves as contracting ‘individuals’. But Pirni's major critical concern is with the ‘Kantian’ universalism that he takes Höffe's notion of ‘transcendental interests’ to represent. In particular, Pirni suspects that little more than the right to life, and not the range of economic, social and cultural rights to which Höffe refers, can be shown to correspond to interests whose satisfaction is necessary for the pursuit of any further particular interests. Pirni further alleges that the concentration on such ‘transcendental’ interests risks undervaluing other particular interests whose satisfaction is equally essential to an individual's identity, such as interests that derive from specific cultural practices or political structures

Constructivism (international relations) · Critical theory · Criticism · Epistemology · Humanities · International relations · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transcendental number · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theology and Sovereignty