Topic of the thesis:
Political Realism as a Critical Project? A "Critical" Appraisal.
Abstract:
Political realism is typically considered as a pessimistic and conservative approach with a built-in status quo bias. It is claimed that its insistence on the facts and on the contingencies of politics deprive it of any normative purchase and that its groundedness in the status quo comes at the price of an essential incapability to envisage any departures from it. Several theorists tried to answer this objection, proposing different versions of political realism. In this project, I aim to examine one of these. The version I focus on is based on the idea that a realist political theorizing may generate its normative purchase not via the formulation and articulation of first principles, but through a contextual and immanent critique of beliefs, practices, and institutions in a given society at a given time, independently from any moral grounds. My goals are 1) to reconstruct the philosophical path that brought to this critical account of political realism, showing the influence that Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss had on its formulation, and 2) to test and question its strengths and weaknesses. In this regard, I will focus on three problems in particular, which I label as genetic fallacy, performative contradiction, and internal inconsistency. I aim to show that a certain conception and a certain use of the genealogical method, a key but controversial tool for critical thinking, can provide an answer to the first and the second of these problems, although it cannot avoid a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of political realism in the light of the third.
Research interests:
1) Meta-theoretical issues in political philosophy (realism and idealism,relationship between political philosophy and history, feasibility).2) Bernard Williams' moral and political thought.
Graduated from:Università degli studi di Milano(BA)(MA)
Degrees obtained:Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy Master's Degree in Philosophical Sciences
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