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About The Event
in conversation with MICHELE COMETA
Looking into the eyes of an orangutan, an octopus, a whale shark. Setting out to understand a desert, a forest, or a mountain range while crossing the traditions of human thought. Moving from New York to the Galápagos, from Iceland to Borneo, from Rwanda to Tibet, to immerse oneself in our home, the planet we must steward.
A planet whose future must be written: in recent years, the destructive impact of human civilization on nature has been recognized, made evident by climate catastrophes, extinctions of entire animal species, desertification, and the disappearance of landscapes. Yet, this awareness has not brought about any real change in our ways of living, in the solutions adopted by industrial societies to avoid catastrophe. At the same time, we are witnessing the spread of a passionate love and deep nostalgia for the untamed nature, a refuge from the deafening dissonance of the world. It is undoubtedly a genuine sentiment, but completely inadequate to protect the Earth.
From this paradoxical split, aware that scientific truth alone does not seem enough to shake us, begins the journey of Paolo Pecere.
PAOLO PECERE is a historian of philosophy and a writer of fiction and literary non-fiction.
He is associate professor at the University of Roma Tre.
His last scholarly book is Soul, Mind and Brain from Descartes to Cognitive Science (Springer 2020).
His first novel La vita lontana was published in 2018 and he is the author of Risorgere (2019) and Il dio che danza (2021).
MICHELE COMETA is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. His research focuses on German cultural history and aesthetics (especially in the age of Goethe), literary theory, and visual culture. At the Italian Academy he will work on the challenge that paleolithic “arts” and the old and new theories on the origin of human symbolic behaviour issue to contemporary visual culture.