Nostalgie metafisiche: la crisi delle scienze nell'era postmoderna

By crisis of sciences we mean, on the one hand, the epistemological crisis faced after the aporias of logical neo-positivism and the crisis of foundations that invests hard sciences; on the other, the questioning of their role concerning the social contract. These two aspects intertwine and feed each other, and both are objects of the so-called ‘postmodern’ critique. In this essay we will try to describe and analyze the profound dismay this crisis entails in our society, investing it at the collective and individual levels. In this crisis, we will analyze what seems to us an anthropological resistance to the possibility that there is no clearly bounded centre of knowledge, which we will describe as a sort of metaphysical nostalgia that fuels individual suffering, social debates, as well as academic disputes