Research Topics

Research Areas

The processes of evolution and change in today's global society — a stage for increasingly pressing and profound drives toward innovation, traversed by a permanent flow of information and data, and characterized by the radical complexity of its networks of relations — are not only reconfiguring geopolitical, economic, social, and anthropological landscapes, giving rise to unprecedented conflicts, but are also compelling every form of knowledge, and humanistic knowledge in particular, to redefine its own status, practices, and role. With this in mind, the "Doctoral Programme in Historical and Philosophical Heritages for Sustainable Innovation" aims to provide an adequate theoretical-conceptual and methodological toolkit for rethinking the status and practice of historical and philosophical inquiry at the level demanded by contemporary challenges. The humanities are called upon to interrogate the definitions of innovation and sustainability, to contribute to the development of new approaches to reality, its constituent elements, and the relations among them, and to encourage the prefiguration of a new "humanism" capable of working within the aporia between innovation and sustainability. The question is, in fact, whether the paradigms of a modernity devoted exclusively to innovation do not obstruct the capacity to read the past and sustain the present.

The training programme aims to equip doctoral candidates with the tools to carry out original research that is theoretically informed and historically and philologically grounded, with particular attention to comparative approaches and the international dimension of research. The Doctoral Programme is structured around two curricula — one focused primarily on Philosophy, the other on History — in keeping with the thematic and methodological specificities of each discipline, though without any obligation to prescribe entirely separate tracks. The guiding idea is rather to privilege a strongly interdisciplinary path, attending carefully to the exchange and mutual influence between historical developments and forms of thought, both in the design of teaching activities and in the evaluation of research projects.

The following guiding principles are therefore proposed:

to affirm the scientific value of historical research, which is increasingly obscured by generalizations, oversimplifications, and hazardous acts of presentism;
to look at historical development along a long axis, crossing chronological and disciplinary boundaries that hinder a full understanding of phenomena;
to construct, on the basis of a critical study of the past, interpretive categories and axes of reflection that respond to the problems of a pluralized and fragmented world;
to develop critical thinking understood as the capacity to elaborate and call into question — at an ontological and epistemological level — the achievements and applications of the various forms of knowledge of our time, with reference to the challenges posed by the digitization of the world and the organization of the information society;
to foster a critical reappropriation of the philosophical, scientific, and cultural tradition, developing — including on the basis of original documentary sources — a history of the production, dissemination, and effects of texts, traditions, theoretical paradigms, epistemic practices, and social products. This historical-philosophical approach is closely linked to the identification and elaboration of new models that give due weight to the objectives of the European agenda, such as inclusivity, sustainability, resilience, innovation, ecological and digital transition, and so on;
to provide tools for the analysis and critical evaluation of different languages as vectors of knowledge, participation, sharing, and inclusion.