ROME, Italy -Have you ever heard talking about Popsophia? What will it ever be? Simple, it is the philosophy of the contemporaneity which was born in the beautiful lands called Marche, a district in the heart of Italy, four years ago. It rose from the need to save academic philosophy from its own reclution among its beautiful ivory college towers.
At first it was born like a summer cultural event, where intellectuals dealt with important cultural and social problems of our age, through the eyes of philosophy. For example, this year it has dealt with the historic and existential trauma caused by shipwrecks in contrast with the joy which finds new resources just inside catastrophes. Last year, instead, it dealt with the problem of the fake presence of men in the present time, and two years ago it debated about the actual meaning of heros and anti-heroes in our society. Then, if we want to go more closer to it’ s start we can find other topics such as: the feminism in Carrie Bradshaw, the nostalgia in Mad Man, the importance of traditions in our multiethnic society, the relation between laugh and philosophy.
In this four years it has been devolving itself, infact, it has became a growth project too, that involves teachers, students and even political istitutions, and now, even if it is not going to stop to be a summer cultural event, it has been becoming a cultural challenge able to be in the middle of the italian cultural debate.
The exact purpose of Popsophia is to lead the academic philosophy to its origin. To be able to understand that, it is very important to mention what Cicerone said and what Socrates did. The stoic Roman, who died to fight for its ideas, used to say that philosophy had to abandon the sky to go among people, while Socrates used to go right down among that people in his town square’s street to spread the concepts of Truth and Justice using the pure beauty of philosophy and dialectical dialogues.
In this moment, probably you all are wondering why these two philosophers are so important to make us realize Popsophia’s goal; and well, the reason is hidden behind the fact that both desired to use philosophy to create a better world and a better man and in order to do that they tried to convince people using those dear philosophical concepts of them in their daily routine and that’s what Popsophia wants too. They succeeded in their task because philosophy was something alive at their age and a lot of men asked them for advices.
Unfortunately, today is not like yesterday. Today philosophy has to change the traditional means used by the Ancient great Philosophers to spread its concepts, because it has two problems that before were absent. The first concerns the fact that in our time philosophy and human life are divided, while the second is that popsophia doesn’t receive enough helps from the academics who think it is not anything serious.
The thing is that, in the society of money, fun without a noble progress and narcisism, where most of people are in fashion, riches and sex, philosophy has been losing its charm every day so using philosophy’ s beauty to spread philosophy like Socrate did is not enough anymore. Today, it seems philosophy doesn’ t find its sit and the philosophy of the contemporaneity wants give one to it, how? Using what has turned it into an old fashion thigh. Regarding this subject it’ s very important to mention what the pioneer of this new kind of philosophy, Lucrezia Ercoli thinks. She thinks that the solution of the actual philosophy’s problem is to make join pop-culture and academic philosophy and the better way to do that is making join pop-life (mass state life) with philosophy or we can say to put philosophy in what people are into, namely, philosophy must have a confrontation with the mass society’s products. It is not for azard, infact, that Avital Ronell, an American philosopher who contributes to the field of continental, political and feminist philosophy, for example says: “if Aristotele wrote now he would deal with soap opera”.
This is the way, the mean that popsophia found and has been using for four years to make philosophy living again with a more and more increasing succes among young and old nowadays people.
Now, that you know about this cultural event, precisely sets at the Rocca Costanza of Pesaro, in Marche district around July and August of every year, just one thing remains to do: to think about if, Popsophia can have a shot for becoming a new cultural movement or if it is destined to an impasse without progress.
By Agnese Andreocci
