21/05/2024 08:30 - 12:00

HALL: FATESI - DI GIOVANNI

Proponent: Rakotoniaina M.

Chair: Rakotoniaina M.

Speaker: Bennett D., Chakkalakkal A.J., Lindholm L., Łukasz Sawicki B., Rakotoniaina M., Yearwood A.

Penned in 1942, Simone Weil' s essay « Les formes implicites de l'amour de Dieu » encloses one of the most profound reflections on love and affection. "Friendship is a miracle", she asserts. This miracle binds necessity and liberty together in reaching a harmony of souls similar to the Pythagorean adage (which she quotes), "friendship is an equality made of harmony". This panel will take Simone Weil's thinking as its inspiration, while opening it to studies pertaining to the possibility of attachment and disinterested love, not only intimately but also as a social possibility. This philosophy of alterity constructs a dimension of our existence that reshapes Aristotle's zoon politikon. As Hannah Arendt also recalls in The Human Condition, "animal socialis, already found in Seneca, (…) then became the standard translation through Thomas Aquinas: homo est naturaliter politicus, id est, socialis ("man is by nature political, that is, social")".
This panel invites all proposals pertaining to the themes of affection and friendship, particularly from the fields of philosophy, political theory, systematic theology, and ethics. From this interdisciplinarity, we invite papers which seek to reconcile and describe the public and private, or 'intimate' and socially personal aspects of love, particularly how these distinctions are essential for human flourishing in an age which is losing them.