The ERATO Center

The increasingly rapid technological transformations taking place in the contemporary world make it urgent to analyze the changes they have to the human condition.

The ERATO Center aims to approach this analysis from a broad philosophical perspective, highlighting the ethical, technological, and anthropological dimensions of the question.

The thematic area on which the Center will develop its activities concerns the challenges of the contemporary world: the transformation of the human condition in the context of new technologies (digital turn, biotechnology), the change of imaginaries, affects, behaviors, 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 that reflect the transdisciplinary approach the group intends to take. 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 some avenues of contemporary philosophical anthropology), and theoretical analysis (with particular reference to debates on the philosophy of technology, media, and the digital). Building on the diversity of ethico-philosophical approaches, the Center approaches specific research topics from a plural perspective, showing how analyses from multiple angles can offer unified perspectives on contemporary ethical problems.

Members of the Center contribute, not only as a collective but also independently, 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 is done through intensive scientific and teaching activities, with the latter itself considered functional to research, presenting itself, among other things, as a laboratory open to experimentation and the identification of new shared ways of producing and disseminating philosophical knowledge. The Center’s activities include, among others, sharing research in academic and extra-academic settings, organizing seminars and study days, conferences, workshops, presenting nationally and internationally competitive projects, and scientific publications.

Specifically, the group will focus its research, education and cultural outreach activities on the following topics: Anthropology of Technology, Ethics of the Environment, Ethics and Philosophy of the Image, Ethics of Technology, Media Philosophy and Digital Humanism.
The choice of these themes is justified by the approaches the research group intends to take, which can be summarized under three key words: Ethics, Anthropology and Technique.
These key words also correspond to the Center’s Research Areas (RAs): these do not so much represent internal divisions within the Center, but rather the plurality of approaches and perspectives that animate it; in fact, the members of the Center work individually, in parallel and in groups of different sizes according to individual projects, taking into account the orientations of the individual Areas, but without setting disciplinary limits on any one of them.