University of Padua, Italy
Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology


Invited Talk

Towards a Non-Naturalistic Naturalism

In this presentation I would like to give the perspective of what I call a non-naturalistic naturalism. To this end, I will start from the attempts that run through a not insignificant part of contemporary culture, aimed at eradicating the concept of nature, which is emblematic of a subjectivist, violent and predatory attitude not only towards the environment, but also towards women and, especially through the colonial experience, towards oppressed peoples. After pointing out the philosophical reasons for these attempts, I will try to show some of the dangers associated with this desired erasure of nature. In particular, I will try to argue how the obliteration of nature actually leads to the element of of externality that this concept represents, and how the dissolution of externality in fact tends to dissipate all the features of resistance and friction that this externality embodies. In this sense, what is at stake is not the abolition of the concept of nature, but its decolonization, that is, its liberation from a perspective according to which this concept would draw its meaning only from the implicit ontology of the natural sciences. To initiate this strategy of decolonization, I will focus on the concept of agency by revisiting Kant's, Schelling's, and Hegel's concepts of nature and interpret it (the notion of agency) as a notion that should not be read in opposition to nature's mode of being, but as an element that constitutes it.