Que s’est-il passé entre Aṣ̌i et Zaraϑuštra? (original) (raw)

TRADIZIONI MORALI. GRECI, EBREI, CRISTIANI, ISLAMICI, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma

2015

This book tells the story of the genesis and subsequent self-transformations of a discourse that cannot be found in current histories of philosophy. In fact, it does not reconstruct the story of one sub-discipline of “philosophy”, but instead the story of two “moral traditions”, two distinct traditions of critical reflection on zedaqà and hokmā or on dyke and phronesis, two couples of concepts whence – by adding, subtracting, emphasizing, and crossbreeding – the concepts of “justice” and “wisdom” took their origin; by these concepts, western languages have always framed questions about how we should live and how we should interact with each other. It reconstructs then the process of crossbreeding between both traditions through syntheses, controversies, annexations, misunderstandings, which gave birth to several subsequent moral traditions and whose legitimacy claims may be traced precisely in those ancient controversies. Such still competing moral traditions are the Christian, the rabbinic Jewish, the Islamic traditions, and finally that of neoclassical humanism and Enlightenment. It reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, or codes of shared rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories, or reflections on the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines showing that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us.