Philosophical hermeneutics of religious experience in Luigi Pareyson and his school

• Applicant: Professor Gianluca De Candia, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Roman Catholic Theology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392534291

In the context of the Middle European philosophy of recent decades, deconstruction is not the only form of a philosophical hermeneutics of Christianity. An alternative program was indeed offered by Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991) and by those students of his students who followed his ontology of freedom as a philosophical hermeneutics of religious experience. These are lesser-known students compared to those who have turned more stridently towards a weak ontology (Gianni Vattimo), an aesthetic tendency of Christianity (M. Perniola) or an opened semiotics (Umberto Eco). The theoretical elaboration by Ugo Perone, Claudio Ciancio and Sergio Givone has the merit, on the one hand, of counteracting the de-ontologization of hermeneutics without falling into ontotheology and, on the other hand, to vigorously exploit the veritative (anthropological and metaphysical) potential of biblical revelation without ignoring either the problem of the splintered truth-character of being, raised by Nachmethapysisches Denken, or the un-eliminable and fruitful tension between philosophical mediation and religious immediacy. This reception work regarding the most important Italian philosophical school after the Second World War, still only partially known in the German context, is primarily intended to reconstruct, in a genetic-systematic key, the (personalistic, hermeneutical and ontological) premises of the intellectual route that led the late Pareyson to elaborate his philosophy as a hermeneutics of religious experience, and secondly to verify the creative reception of his proposal in the Denkweg of his three pupils: U. Perone, C. Ciancio, S. Givone. Such a program eventually makes a significant contribution to theology itself in the elaboration of an ontological-based hermeneutical conception that is capable of clarifying and universalizing the philosophical relevance of Christianity. The pursuit of Pareyson and of his school has thus proved that Christianity has not yet exhausted its ability to produce and demand philosophy, and that its claim of truth, appropriately interrogated, may still survive the impact with the Lebenswelt.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Ugo Perone, Ph.D.