San Raffaele School of Philosophy 2026 - SRSP

San Raffaele School of Philosophy 2026

December 14^th – 16^th, 2026

Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan

Faculty of Philosophy

Campus Milano 2 - Segrate

In a multi-crisis and rapidly changing world such as the one we are currently living in, our own humanity faces crucial challenges. Conflicts and wars, as well as social and political contexts in which propaganda, manipulation and conformism, violence, hate speech, and abuse of power overflow, make philosophical reflection on what remains of humanity and how to promote its flourishing all the more compelling.

In this School, we aim to explore this issue from a variety of philosophical perspectives, combining a theoretical approach with more practical and applied ones.

Section 1. From a phenomenological point of view, we seek to explore how humanity can be preserved and renovated in one’s personal and social stance-takings, including acts of empathy and feeling together, shared emotions, value feeling, as well as collective acts of resistance. At the same time, we aim to investigate how phenomena in which one’s possibilities of personal stance-taking fail (e.g., forms of social conformity, repression, and reification of human persons) negatively impact personal flourishing, interpersonal relationships, and ultimately the core aspects of our own humanity.

Section 2. This section focuses on the role of discursive strategies and argumentative practices in shaping epistemic injustice in contexts involving marginalized communities. Public discourse plays a central role in distributing credibility, structuring whose voices are heard, and determining how disagreement is managed under conditions of inequality. Discursive and argumentative practices can both reinforce epistemic marginalization—through silencing, distortion, or dismissal—and enable forms of resistance that restore voice and recognition.

We invite contributions that examine how power asymmetries affect the uptake of both speech acts and arguments, how marginalized speakers navigate public disagreement, and which discursive strategies - such as protest or counterspeech - can effectively challenge discursive and epistemic injustice in contemporary communication environments.

Section 3. explores contemporary forms of collective resistance as practices through which individuals and groups claim and defend their humanity in contexts of oppression, injustice, and structural violence. Framing resistance as a morally significant practice, this section starts from the question of civil disobedience: can the deliberate and public breach of unjust norms constitute not only a politically legitimate act, but also a gesture of restoring dignity – one's own and that of others? Building on this, we examine the relationship between resistance and democracy, considering radical critique of structures of domination – political, legal, migratory – as a condition for democratic renewal. Solidarity and collective action appear here not merely as political strategies, but as ethical practices that mutually reactivate one's humanity, generate obligations toward others, and reconfigure the boundaries of moral communities.

Section 4. From the perspective of philosophy of perception, we aim to investigate how perceptual experience contributes to our recognition of others as persons and to the apprehension of morally and socially salient aspects of reality. Can emotions, intentions, vulnerability, dignity be directly perceived in our encounters with others, or are they merely inferred from perceptual cues? Addressing debates on social and moral perception, this section seeks to explore how perceptual experience may ground forms of responsiveness, empathy, and acknowledgment of others in public and social life. At the same time, we aim to examine how perceptual processes may be shaped or distorted by social norms, stereotypes, and ideological frameworks, thereby affecting what becomes salient in experience and potentially contributing to forms of objectification, dehumanization, or indifference toward suffering.

Section 5. explores the role of contemporary artistic practices in critically interrogating the conditions of our present and reimagining what it means to remain human in times of crisis. Rather than approaching art as a static object of historical inquiry, we invite contributions that engage with artistic practices as living, relational, and socially embedded forms of thought. We envision contemporary art as a site where ethical and political questions converge, traversing media, geographies, narratives, and experiences of displacement through reflexivity and imaginative speculation. Particular attention may be given to perspectives attuned to a feminist ethics of care, especially to Joan C. Tronto’s notion of “caring with” as the foundation of truly democratic societies grounded in reciprocity, interdependence, and accountability toward both human and more-than-human worlds. In a present marked by intertwined crises – wars, geopolitical instability, forced displacement, and climate emergency – this section seeks to foreground the emancipatory and generative potential of artistic practices to cultivate new forms of coexistence and shared imaginaries.

For further information, please contact Simone Santamato (s.santamato@studenti.unisr.it) and/or Vittorio Catalano (v.catalano@univie.ac.at).