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Philosophy: Scienza or sapienza?Many of its academic practitioners view philosophy as a scientific or even mathematical discipline, pursued in order to discover general and fundamental truths about mind and reality, truths which are worth discovering for their own sake and don't bear very much on the way we live our lives. Philosophy is, thus seen, a self-contained exercise generating interesting but neutral knowledge - scienza. Contrasting with this is a view of philosophy as a life-shaping activity, a meaning-giving search for the meaning of life. It is wisdom or the pursuit thereof - sapienza.
By and large, scienza is these days pursued in academia, by specialists, while sapienza has a very large outreach with laypeople, outside of academia. Contrast the sales of, say, Timothy Williamson's Modal Logic as Metaphysics with bestsellers like Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society. Even the titles are telling; the second one speaks instantly to most of us, the first only to analytic philosophers with certain research specialisms.
How did we get to this sharp division, between a scientistic, abstract approach to philosophy and an inspirational, value-driven one? The distinction did not really exist for ancient and medieval philosophers. Yes, they too aimed for general and fundamental insights about mind and reality. But these were not pursued for their own sake, but for the sake of what makes a human life good. Scienza was the maid of sapienza, steeped in axiology, meaning, value, purpose, telos. Philosophy, in this older tradition, was maximally aspirational.
I believe that this division is not accidental, but has deep roots and has been long in the making. To shed some light, I will discuss a few episodes of its development: (a) Aristotle's needs-based and value-based understanding of human nature and life, (b) its replacement with the mathematico-mechanical world picture during the scientific revolution of the 17th century, (c) the culmination of this world picture in early analytic philosophy, the rejection of this world picture (d) in the later analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein and (e) in continental figures such as Heidegger and Hans Jonas. As these last three rather disparate thinkers seem to converge on Aristotle, my (admittedly sweeping) story suggests that Western philosophy could, and maybe should, be described as an unfortunate departure from and a necessary return to Aristotle. One benefit of this return could be the closure of the gap between scienza and sapienza. Another one could be the closure of the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. A third benefit could be more valuable still. For as we live in a time in which industrial civilisation has conquered the whole globe and has brought peril to life and nature, few things would seem more timely than the reconsideration of the views of the "philosopher of life" par excellence.
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