Working Groups

At a philosophical level, it is evident how the increasingly rapid technological transformations taking place in the contemporary world make an analysis of the changes they produce in the human condition urgent.

Erato aims to take on this analysis from a broad philosophical perspective, highlighting the issue’s ethical, technological, and anthropological dimensions.
The thematic area concerning which the group will develop its activities will therefore concern the challenges of the contemporary world: the transformation of the human condition in the context of new technologies (digital turning point, biotechnologies), the change in imaginaries, affects, behaviour and social interactions in the latest technological environments, the relationship between human and non-human, with particular reference to the ecological question and the future of the planet.

The analysis will be conducted through different methodologies reflecting the transdisciplinary approach the group intends to adopt.
Of particular importance are conceptual analysis (typical of a certain modus operandi of bioethics and applied ethics in general), historical-genealogical analysis (developed in the context of cultural studies, historical anthropology, and certain paths of contemporary philosophical anthropology), and theoretical analysis (with particular reference to the debates on the philosophy of technology, media, and the digital).
Building on the diversity of ethical-philosophical approaches, the group will address specific research topics from a plural perspective, showing how analyses from multiple angles can offer unified perspectives on contemporary ethical problems.

The laboratory members contribute, not only as a collective but also autonomously, to developing and disseminating the group’s themes and lines of research, both among members of the scientific community and in spaces open to public debate and dialogue with institutions. This will take place through an intense scientific and didactic activity, with the latter itself considered functional to research, presenting itself, among other things, as an open laboratory for experimentation and the identification of new shared ways of producing and disseminating philosophical knowledge. The group’s activities will include, among others, the sharing of research in academic and extra-academic spheres, the organisation of seminars and study days, congresses, workshops, the presentation of nationally and internationally competitive projects and scientific publications.

Specifically, the group will focus its research, training, and cultural dissemination activities on the following themes: Anthropology of Technique, Ethics of the Environment, Ethics and Philosophy of the Image, Ethics of Technology, Media Philosophy, and Digital Humanism.
The choice of these topics is justified by the approaches the research group intends to adopt, which can be subsumed under three keywords: Anthropology, Ethics, and Technique.
To these keywords also correspond the theoretical axes of the research group: these do not so much represent internal divisions within the group, but rather the plurality of approaches and perspectives that animate it; the members of the research group work individually, in parallel, and in groups of different sizes according to the individual projects, taking into account the orientations of the individual axes, but without setting themselves disciplinary limits in one of them.