Fulvio Papi

Imperfect Education. Philosophical considerations about modern Education

Edited by Elena Madrussan

In the chasm of the “fault breakage”, whichburst open before our very eyes for the last twenty years, a possible way to understand the relevance of the senseof education, consists in estimating its losses. Not in the sense of regret, but in the sense of possibility. As if something, in the transformingentropy of our historical and cultural events, by silently fading itsquestioning disquiet and semantic plurality, could paradoxically allow its main characters to emerge, after a period of latency, in an entirely new form and with an entirely new destiny.

For this reason, according to FulvioPapi, education is imperfect in many senses: because it is necessarily unfinished, empirically prospective, intimately unexpressed. Always.

Indeed: thanks to its imperfection, education identifies its objects in what roots it into a specific cultural and historical contingency. It is from the analysis of those epiphenomena, with patience and systematic rationality, that Papi let emerge, from topic to topic, the damna which hypermodernity imposes to education: from insecurity of knowledge to world’s consumes, from therelationships between economy and life to meanings of identity.

By going through the text, almost twenty years afterPapi’s work about Education, not only we realize what is really lost, but we also clarify the image of what is still valid: the philosophical awareness as possibility to get a new point of view, an unthought perspective, an inquiring attitude. And that educational “belief in oneself” capable of withstanding the present and creating the future.

Fulvio Papi, was born in Trieste, and lives in Milan and Stresa. He is an original figureof the philosophical ‘school of Milan’, he interpreted the classics of philosophy (Bruno, Kant, Hegel, Marx) and examined the main lines of contemporary philosophy and political thought. He has taught theoretical philosophy at the University of Pavia since 1965. He published with Ibis the following books: Capire la filosofia(1993); La filosofia del Novecento in seilibri(1999);Filosofia e architettura(2000); Il lusso e la catastrofe(2006); Voci dal tempo difficile(2008); Oggi un filosofo (2009), La biografia impossibile (2011), Il poeta, l’impero, la morte (2015).

Elena Madrussan is Associate Professor at University of Turin, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures. She is Director of “Paideutika. Notebooks on education and culture”.

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