Vinco, Roberto
Senior Fellow: October 2022–February 2023
Research Project: Philosophia Perennis and the Sceptical Challenges of Modernity: A Neo-Thomist Response
The Neo-Thomist (and more generally Neo-Scholastic) movement is characterised by a double dynamic: a negative one and a positive one. Firstly, it is a critique of, and a confrontation with, modern culture and especially with modern philosophy. At the same time, this confrontation pursues a specific positive goal, since it is carried out in order to revive (and update) a fundamental worldview (philosophia perennis/perennial philosophy), which constitutes (at least implicitly) a common core of all major classical philosophical schools and is explicitly and thoroughly articulated by Scholastic philosophy, particularly by St. Thomas Aquinas. Neo-Thomism can therefore be considered as a preservation and reactivation of tradition; not, however, as a mouldy relic, but as a living and powerful force.
The aim of the project is twofold. In the first step, it intends to present this dynamic as a confrontation with the sceptical nature of modern philosophy. In a second step, it intends to analyse the hermeneutical thesis according to which the history of biblical Israel can be considered as a prefiguration of the same “cultural battle.”
Before coming to Hamburg, Roberto Vinco was an acting professor at the Department of Philosophy at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.