Aller au contenu

Contemporary Humanism

International PhD Program & Research Network

  • A PROPOS
    • Qui sommes-nous
    • La convention
    • Le comite de direction et le conseil académique
    • Les doctorants
    • Les anciens doctorants
    • Comment candidater
    • Intranet
    • Nous contacter
  • EVENEMENTS
    • Seminaires annuels
    • Initiatives de recherche
  • PUBLICATIONS
  • BLOG
  • Français
  • A PROPOS
    • Qui sommes-nous
    • La convention
    • Le comite de direction et le conseil académique
    • Les doctorants
    • Les anciens doctorants
    • Comment candidater
    • Intranet
    • Nous contacter
  • EVENEMENTS
    • Seminaires annuels
    • Initiatives de recherche
  • PUBLICATIONS
  • BLOG
  • Français

Le séminaire annuel de 2024

 

Rome, 2–5 Septembre 2024

 

Le séminaire a eu lieu à l’Université LUMSA dans le cadre du projet international New Humanism at the time of Neurosciences and Artificial Intelligence (NHNAI – coordonné par l’UCLy avec le soutien de la FIUC) et avec la collaboration de l’ ATEM. La dernière séssion s’est tenue à Notre Dame Rome.

 

Le programme et les info pratiques sono disponibles ici.

Le poster est ici

 

 

Greetings

 

Francesco Bonini, Rector of LUMSA University (Italy) (video)

Silvia Dall’Olio, Director of the University of Notre Dame Rome (USA) (video)

 

 

Introductions

 

Mathieu Guillermin, Coordinator of NHNAI project, Lyon Catholic University (France) (video)

Dominique Coatanea, President of ATEM, Facultés Loyola Paris (France) (video)

Stefano Biancu, Coordinator of the PhD program « Contemporary Humanism », LUMSA University (Italy) (video)

 

 

Keynote lectures (click on the title to watch the video)

 

Mario De Caro,University of Roma Tre (Italy), The problem of Freedom and today’s challenges

Dominique Lambert, University of Namur (Belgium), Ethics of AI

Thierry Magnin, Catholic University of Lille (France), Christian Thought, Humanism, AI and Neurosciences

Patricia Churchland, University of San Diego (USA), Neurosciences and Human Freedom

Fiorella Battaglia, University of Salento (Italy), Democracy and Education at the Time of AI and Neurosciences

Laura Palazzani, LUMSA-University of Rome (Italy), Health at the Time of AI and Neurosciences

 

 

PhD Students’ Presentations (click on the title to watch the video)

 

  • Marco Tassella, LUMSA-UCLy: The Paradox of Moral Luck: Testing Free Will and Responsibility Against Chance
  • François Deshors, UCLy-LUMSA: Human being and artificial intelligence: prospects and consequences of a hypothetical conflict
  • Alessia Cadelo, LUMSA-UCP: The power of algorithms to redefine human autonomy
  • Pierangelo Bianco, Lumsa-UCP: The search for Habitable Intelligence: George Lindbeck’s contribution to AI Debate
  • Giammarco Basile, LUMSA-PUC: Flaminio Piccoli, the DC and Centrist Democrat International (CDI) 
  • Francesca Fioretti, LUMSA- UCP: Promoting the development of competences for active citizenship in Italy: from school organization to classroom practices
  • Francesco Marcelli, LUMSA: Youth association and the training of the governing class: the case of Catholic university students in Italy and internationally
  • Matteo Mostarda, LUMSA: Integral Human Development in Enrico Mattei’s strategy for Italy
  • Marco Valerio, LUMSA-UCP: Learning to teach civic and citizenship education and education for sustainable development during pre-service teacher training
  • Costanza Vizzani, LUMSA-PUC: The theoretical foundations of the debate on reproductive technologies
  • Sarah Horton, ICP-ACU: Alienation and Self-Knowledge in Maine de Biran
  • Juhani Steinmann, ICP-LUMSA: The Coming God. Soteriological Figures in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
  • Federico Rudari, UCP-LUMSA: Embodied perception and spatial sense-making: from phenomenology to aesthetics
  • Tomaso Pignocchi, LUMSA-ICP: Language and soteriology: the concept of liberation in Wittgenstein and Buddhist philosophies
  • Orlando Garcia, ICP-LUMSA: Human freedom challenged by AI and neuroscience
  • Enrico Di Meo, LUMSA-ICP: Mechanism and Free Will: a possible Convergence Hypothesis
  • Flavia Chieffi, LUMSA-UCly: The role of «symbolic consciousness» in Virgilio Melchiorre’s philosophy
  • Cecilia Benassi, LUMSA: The embodiment of form – Symbolic between poetry and technology
  • Gael Trottmann-Calame, ICP- LUMSA: An all-too-modern modernity: a genealogical investigation

 

Fundamental Freedoms and the Problem of Freedom (Stefano Biancu)

 

For more than a year now, we have been witnessing the biggest limitation of fundamental freedoms since the Second World War, at least in Europe and in many democratic countries. Limitations on social life, on traveling, on worship have become daily life for us. An unprecedented limitation of freedoms (in the plural) urges us to question ourselves about the nature of freedom (in the singular): what does it mean to be free?

 

 

  1. The Ideal and the Concept of Freedom

 

When you lose something, you often learn the hard way how important it was what you had taken for granted. Today, in the midst of a long health emergency, being confined and limited in many ways, we perceive how essential freedom is. At the same time, we find it hard to say what is this freedom that we miss so much. The ideal of freedom is clear: we all agree on how important freedom is. But the concept of freedom is complex and someway mysterious: it is not easy to say what freedom really is.

Freedom is certainly a set of simple things: gathering with family and friends, traveling, going to the cinema or to an art exhibition, having a coffee sitting at a bar table, eating a pizza with friends, moving around, taking a walk under the stars in the middle of the night, not being forced to wear a mask. We understand all this very well: it is what we miss. But we are aware that freedom is not just that.

To try to understand what freedom is, let’s start with a distinction that has become a classic: the distinction between negative and positive freedom. It is a distinction already proposed by Immanuel Kant,[1] but which has become a classic after the famous inaugural lecture on “Two Concepts of Liberty” that sir Isaiah Berlin gave at Oxford University in 1958.[2]

 

 

  1. Negative and Positive Freedom

 

Negative freedom is the mere absence of external limits or interference. It is therefore a freedom that has to do with society and which concerns the action of the agent. It corresponds to what is lawful and allowed. Negative freedom – to which Berlin gives a preference in the political sphere – can be easily understood in the plural (in the sense of the fundamental freedoms). As the absence of external constraints, negative freedom is now vastly more limited than it was before the pandemic.

Instead, positive freedom can be understood in terms of self-control and self-determination. It concerns the will of the agent and it corresponds to autonomy, in the sense of the power of the subject to give norms to themselves.

Positive freedom is complex. It is certainly to be understood as free will, that is, the ability to choose between different options. In this sense, it is an innate capacity of the human being. This capacity is very much discussed today in the debate on determinism raised by the neurosciences. For now, there is no philosophical or scientific evidence that allows us to deny this fundamental human ability. In the absence of this evidence, I firmly believe that we must assume this capacity exists. Especially in that the possibility of moral, legal and political responsibility is based on this same capacity.

 

 

  1. Love and then do what you want

 

But positive freedom is not just free will, that is, the formal and innate possibility of choosing between different options, of doing what you want. Positive freedom is also an ability of autonomy which develops over time. It is not the mere possibility for the agent to do what they want, but it is the ability for the subject to truly want to do what they do, to fully own their actions. In this sense, freedom is being one with yourself, fulfilling your own humanity.

Let’s think about Saint Augustine’s iconic formulation of freedom – “Dilige et quod vis fac” (Love and then do what you want).[3] Only superficially freedom is the empty possibility of loving or not loving (or even hating).

Only if you act motivated by love, you are truly free. When you act out of fear, resentment, envy, vice, you may act within a space of non-constraint and free choice between different options, but you don’t feel like you are really free, you don’t feel like you are one with yourself. You don’t feel like you really want to do what you do. You are truly free only if you act motivated by love – love for yourself and love for your neighbour.

The first article of 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. This statement is to be understood as a regulative ideal and not as a matter of fact.[4] It is not true at all the human beings are born free and equal.

From a legal and political point of view, freedom must be understood as an innate right to be protected. Negative freedom must protect the innate free will of the human being. Human beings are born capable of free will, but freedom understood as being one with yourself is an achievement for them. Freedom is also a path to take.

 

 

  1. Neoliberal Freedom

 

Today we are facing a neoliberal and very pervasive idea of freedom. A freedom which presents itself as the opposite of constraint, but which actually generates constraint itself. In 2014 Korean philosopher based in Germany Byung-Chul Han published his book “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power”.[5] In this book, Byung-Chul Han states that the neoliberal subject sees themselves as a project which is free from obligations and constraints imposed by others.

Nevertheless, being in competition with all their fellow humans, this subject forces themselves to efficiency and ends up submitting to internal obligations and self-imposed constraints. Believing themselves to be free, the individual is in reality a servant who exploits themselves. As Byung-Chul Han points out, “Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom”. “People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as a responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system”.

With respect to the neoliberal project, it is evident that a purely negative freedom – which aims to limit as much as possible the external constraints of freedom – does not guarantee in itself the quality and the strength of freedom. Freedom is not only the possibility to do what you want. As Byung-Chul Han shows it, this kind of freedom can put the subject against themselves.

More deeply, freedom should be understood as the ability for the subject to want to do what they do, to be one with their own will and action. Freedom is the capacity for the subject to fully own themselves, and therefore to completely realize themselves. Only this way we will all be equal because we will all be enabled to completely fulfil our own humanity. Only love – love for ourselves and love for our neighbours – allows us to reach our humanity and autonomy.

This means that we should teach our children how to be truly free, how to be happy, not how to be successful.

 

 

  1. Democracy and Freedom

 

Even on a political level, freedom cannot be understood as mere indifference, as mere possibility to think or not to think. Democracy not only guarantees freedom of action and thought, but presupposes and needs citizens that are truly capable of free action and thought. The democratic form of sovereignty can only be achieved if citizens are fully in control of themselves, of their wishes and needs – if they are truly free.[6]

A people incapable of controlling their wishes and needs produces a democracy of slaves. Otherwise, the free and active democratic participation is reduced to a list of complaints. The citizen is transformed into a passive consumer.[7]

In these times, when negative freedom is much more limited than it used to be before the pandemic, we can take the opportunity to work towards the development of a more positive freedom. A kind of freedom which is the ability for the subject to truly become themselves, to be one with themselves. A kind of freedom which is not mere indifference, not a mere possibility either to love or not to love, either to think or not to think.

Negative freedom is a precondition of love, but love is a precondition of positive freedom. “Love and then do what you want”.

 

 

References

Biancu (2020), Il massimo necessario. L’etica alla prova dell’amore, Mimesis, Milano 2020

Biancu (2021a), “Libertà”, in Dizionarietto di politica. Le nuove parole, Morcelliana, Brescia 2021

Biancu (2021b), “Libertà, invenzione (e manutenzione) di un concetto”, Munera. Rivista europea di cultura, 2/2021

 

[1] See Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785).

[2] See I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), in Id., Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, London 1967, n. ed. in Liberty, H. Hardy (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002; I. Carter, Positive and Negative Liberty, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019 Ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/liberty-positive-negative/.

[3] See Epistolam Joannis ad Parthos, tractatus 7, sect. 8; PL 35, 2033.

[4] See J.-M. Ferry, Les Grammaires de l’intelligence, Cerf, Paris 2004, p. 201.

[5] See B.-C. Han, Psychopolitik. Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2014.

[6] See E.-W. Böckenförde, Die Entstehung des Staates als Vorgang der Säkularisation (1967), in Id., Recht, Staat, Freiheit. Studien zur Rechtsphilosophie, Staatstheorie und Verfassungsgeschichte, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2006, pp. 92-114.

[7] See B.-C. Han, Psychopolitik. Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2014.

 

(Presentation at the SIIAEC online Conference 2021 on “Ethical Action: COVID Affecting Human Rights and Democracy”, April 30 – May 1, 2021)

Menu
  • A PROPOS
    • QUI SOMMES-NOUS
    • La convention
    • Les anciens doctorants
    • Le comite de direction et le conseil academique
    • Comment candidater
    • Les doctorants
    • Nous contacter
  • EVENTS AND AGENDA
    • Seminaires annuels
      • Le séminaire annuel de 2020
      • Le séminaire annuel de 2019 à Paris
      • Le séminaire annuel de 2018 à Rome
    • Initiatives de recherche
  • PUBLICATIONS
    • Intranet
  • Blog
  • INTRANET
TAG
AI Annual Seminar artificial intelligence Cecilia Sabato Christophe Herzog Confiance Covid-19 Democracy Dialogue Digital world education Emmanuel Levinas English English Environmental Care ethics ethics fiducia Francesca Fioretti Français Fratelli tutti Fraternity Freedom Giuseppe Tognon History Humanism Humanisme Interreligious dialogue Jérôme de Gramont Liberty Liberté Love neurosciences Philosophie Philosophy Phénomenologie Religion Roma Rome Seminario Annuale Stefano Biancu Stefano Biancu Supererogation Trust Éthique

©2023 Contemporary Humanism ▸ P.iva IT01091891000 ▸ Privacy Policy

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy Cookie settings REJECT ALL ACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Toujours activé
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Enregistrer & appliquer
  • Français