A Philosophy of Impure Reason: Ethos between Rationality and Passions in Remo Bodei’s Italy

We can summarize the features of Italian philosophy recalling that: “[it] is at his best when attempting to solve problems in which the universal and the particular, the logical and the empirical, collide. Such problems arise from the intersections of associational life and various networks, from individual conscience which combines the awareness of the limits imposed by reality with projections of desire, the opacity of historical experience with its transcriptions into images and concepts, the impotence of morality with the harshness of the world, and thought with experience. There have been thus many (successful) attempts to preserve zones of rationality in territories that appeared to have none and to make sense of forms of knowledge and practices that seemed dominated by the imponderability of arbitrariness, taste and chance.” We can also notice how the description of Italian philosophy seems to place under the idea of “impure reason” also the affirmative task of philosophy and in this sense Italian philosophy is a philosophy of ‘impure reason’; which takes into account the conditions, imperfections and possibilities of the world, as opposed to pure reason, which is instead concerned with knowledge of the absolute, the immutable and the rigidly normative.