Doubt and dialogue
Norberto Bobbio's Labyrinth
ISBN: 9788806265649
publisher: Einaudi
year: 2024
pages: 96
Gustavo Zagrebelsky, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Norberto Bobbio's death, has written a short and passionate book that captures the heart of the thought of the great Italian philosopher, jurist, political scientist and historian of international stature. Bobbio was a “man of doubt,” an expression he used several times in conjunction with his being a “man of dialogue.” The doubt that Bobbio names as a characteristic of himself is, so to speak, the homage to truth that is the stimulus of the question: will what I think, what I believe, etc., be “really true”? But Bobbio was also a “man of dialogue,” and the ethics of dialogue is the coexistence of subjects moving from different positions. And positions are not firm and granitic, but they change and transform. Bobbio knew he was “in the labyrinth” of ideas: his intention was not to reach the truth. Instead, his intention was to help intelligences untangle “as far as possible” each other's misunderstandings.